677 Dylan Thomas (with John Goodby) | Emily Brontë and the Search for Hope

Summary

The History of Literature: Episode 677 – Dylan Thomas with John Goodby | Emily Brontë and the Search for Hope

Introduction

In this episode of The History of Literature, host Jack Wilson delves into the complex legacy of Dylan Thomas, exploring the man behind the myth with the assistance of his biographer, John Goodby. The discussion not only highlights Thomas's contributions to 20th-century poetry and literature but also examines the enduring stereotypes that have overshadowed his literary prowess.

Guest Introduction

• John Goodby: Professor of Arts and Culture at Sheffield Hallam University, expert on Dylan Thomas, and co-author of a critical biography on Thomas for the Critical Live series by Reaction Books.

Dylan Thomas's Literary Standing in the UK and Beyond

John Goodby provides insight into Thomas's dual legacy in popular culture and academic circles:

• Popularity vs. Academic Recognition: While Dylan Thomas remains a household name in Britain, particularly among the general public, his prominence as a subject of academic study has waned compared to 40-50 years ago. Goodby notes, “[...] popular knowledge of him as a figure is still quite widespread [...] Under Milk Wood...Strand Films...spoken word industry” (20:14).

• Media Presence: Thomas's work, especially Under Milk Wood, continues to be broadcast, maintaining his presence in popular media.

Critical Reception and Stereotypes

Goodby discusses the fluctuating critical reception of Thomas:

• Rise and Fall in Criticism: Thomas enjoyed significant critical acclaim in the 1950s and 60s, which subsequently declined due to shifting literary trends and conservative backlash in the late 1970s. He explains, “[...] English critics in particular saw him as beneath themselves. [...] part of what I was doing was an attempt to redeem him” (17:55).

• Stereotypical Portrayals: The enduring image of Thomas as a boisterous, alcoholic poet overshadows his literary achievements. Goodby remarks, “It's the sort of person who, you know, you might take to a party. [...] He's beloved of film stars and rock stars” (35:34).

Dylan Thomas's Persona and Media Influence

Thomas's adeptness at navigating various media platforms contributed to his widespread fame:

• Multifaceted Career: Beyond poetry, Thomas wrote radio plays, short stories, and film scripts, engaging with emerging media like LP records and television. Goodby highlights, “He was the favorite poet of John Lennon, [...] spoken word industry” (44:56).

• Cultural Icon: Thomas became a symbol bridging high art and mass culture, making his work accessible while retaining artistic depth.

Childhood and Early Influences

Goodby outlines the formative years that shaped Thomas's literary voice:

• Early Life in Swansea: Raised in a supportive yet complex household, Thomas was influenced by his father's English teaching and his mother's affectionate nature. “His father was the English master at the school he went to [...] his mother was very, very cozy and loving” (46:09).

• Dual Influences: Exposure to both structured education and amateur theatre fostered Thomas’s dramatic and rhythmic poetic style.

Literary Style and Influences

The conversation touches upon Thomas's stylistic development and literary influences:

• Joycean Influence: Thomas inherited and transformed James Joyce's innovative use of language, embracing a lyrical and rhythmic style that often defies straightforward comprehension. Goodby states, “Carl Shapiro...subvert its standard syntax [...] develop different personalities” (24:04).

• Modernist Elements: Thomas’s work reflects high modernism, characterized by complex structures and thematic depth, making his poetry both challenging and rewarding.

John Goodby’s Motivation and Scholarly Contribution

Goodby explains his dedication to reevaluating Dylan Thomas’s work:

• Academic Revival: Recognizing the neglect of Thomas in contemporary literary studies, Goodby and his co-author Chris Wigginton sought to reintroduce him to modern critical frameworks like feminism and deconstruction. “We thought we were going some way towards unpicking [...] getting to grips with Thomas's work” (25:56).

• Challenging Stereotypes: Goodby aims to dismantle the simplistic, often negative stereotypes surrounding Thomas, advocating for a more nuanced understanding of his literary contributions.

Dylan Thomas’s Legacy and Future Perception

Looking ahead, Goodby speculates on Thomas's lasting impact:

• Enduring Works: Classics like Under Milk Wood and Fern Hill are expected to remain staples in literary anthologies, appreciated both for their artistic merit and cultural significance. “He'll still be read, [...] more Central to the 1930s” (57:08).

• Cultural Memes and Commercialization: Thomas’s lines have permeated popular culture, ensuring his continued relevance. Goodby observes, “Thomas will always be intermeshed [...] gateway to something else” (60:27).

Conclusion

John Goodby’s insights provide a comprehensive reevaluation of Dylan Thomas, advocating for recognition beyond his storied persona. By contextualizing Thomas’s work within both historical and modern frameworks, Goodby underscores the poet’s significant yet often underappreciated contributions to literature.

Notable Quotes

• Jack Wilson [16:35]: “So popular knowledge of him as a figure is still quite widespread and that's because of the way that 1960s pop culture picked him up, film musicians and so on.”

• John Goodby [35:34]: “He's one of the few poets who actually manages to straddle these very different worlds. The esoteric high art [...] and mass appeal.”

• John Goodby [44:56]: “If you look at his day to day records, yes, he's capable of excess. […] But most of the time he is concentrated on being a professional writer.”

Final Thoughts

This episode adeptly navigates the intricacies of Dylan Thomas's literary journey, challenging preconceived notions and highlighting the multifaceted nature of his legacy. Listeners gain a deeper appreciation for Thomas's artistry and the enduring relevance of his work in both academic and popular spheres.

Transcript

[Jack Wilson]

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[Jack Wilson]

Hello. He was the author of some of the 20th century's greatest poetry, stories and radio plays. And yet he's often characterized as a self indulgent, ne'er do well, a garrulous drunk who squandered his talent and worse. He's Dylan Thomas, the inventive Welshman who's still widely known and widely debated. We talked to his biographer John Goodby about the man beneath the myth today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go.

[John Goodby]

Welcome to the podcast.

[Jack Wilson]

I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for being here today.

[John Goodby]

There's a lot of options out there.

[Jack Wilson]

A lot of choices you make. I'm grateful that listening to this show.

[John Goodby]

Was one of them.

[Jack Wilson]

So let's lock in and talk some Dylan Thomas. But before we do that, I want to talk about something else. Darkness, despair, optimism and hope. I've been rereading my Emily Bronte. What a mind she had, what a person she was, and what a novelist. So, so good. I guess I shouldn't use two so's, should I? That doesn't make it. That's not an intensifier. So, so good. That's not what I meant. I didn't mean so, so I meant so good with 10 O's. But she was also quite dark. What was Charlotte's line? Spirits so lost and fallen. That's Wuthering Heights. That's us too, isn't it? These days in early 2025. Spirits so lost and fallen I. I feel seen. I encountered an essay by Emily Bronte that astonished me with its darkness, which is not easy to do to astonish an American living through 2025 with darkness. She was out in nature. And the way. Look, I think there's a common idea that runs through literature. You can see this. Thousands of years of literature and this is what you see is that one only needs to go outside and breathe in the air, contemplate the stars or the sunset, view the majesty of a mountain or the magic of a forest, and one will have one's spirits restored. Lie on your back in a meadow, poet, gazing up at the blue, blue sky and the puffy white clouds, etc. Well, Emily took a different view. Her view is more like, look at all this death and decay and pain and suffering in nature. Everything out here is eating or being eaten, hungry or devoured. It's a bleak view where not even the awe inspiring sublime leads you into a wondrous joy at being alive. And yet, in spite of herself, it seemed she does find some hope. And that's what I appreciate about her. I'm aware of what's happening in America in 2025. It's awful, it's bleak, it's dark. But I am choosing hope. It's a small act of resistance, not to be confused with naivete or willful blindness. It is a choice. This is an essay called the Butterfly by Emily J. Bronte. August 11, 1842. In one of those moods that everyone falls into sometimes, when the world of the imagination suffers a winter that blights its vegetation, when the light of life seems to go out and existence becomes a barren desert where we wander, exposed to all the tempests that blow under heaven, without hope of rest or shelter, in one of these black humors, I was walking one evening at the edge of a forest. It was summer. The sun was still shining high in the west, and the air resounded with the songs of birds. All appeared happy, but for me it was only an appearance. I sat at the foot of an old oak among whose branches the nightingale had just begun its vespers. Poor fool, I said to myself, is it to guide the bullet to your breast or the child to your brood that you sing so loud and clear? Silence. That untimely tune. Perch yourself on your nest. Tomorrow perhaps it will be empty. Let me pause. There we have a nightingale of all creatures, the pinnacle of poetic inspiration, serving as shorthand for Keatsian reveries for thousands of years. It's in Homer. And here's Emily in her state, her black humor state, where when all appears happy. But that's false, she says, that's just an appearance. She hears the song, the music that Homer, everyone through from Homer, through Keats, heard and revered, transported them, those poets. But she says, what a fool is it to guide the bullet to your breast? You sing like that. You're singing. Your singing is Dumb nightingale, You're. You'll die. Maybe today. Your nest might be empty tomorrow. This isn't. As for Emily Bronte, the nightingale song is not a song. It's not music to inspire lovers or poets. It's a dumb creature putting a bullseye on its chest. In Wuthering Heights, the narrator says at one point, oh, oh, there's a pile of something that looks like cats, and it turns out to be a heap of dead rabbits. Shut up, nightingale. Enjoy your nest now. It might be empty tomorrow. That's pretty bleak. And then we're just getting started. Emily Bronte doubles down and triples down.

[John Goodby]

She's.

[Jack Wilson]

Let's go back to the essay. But why address myself to you alone? She's still talking to the nightingale. But why address myself to you alone? All creation is equally mad. Behold those flies playing above the brook. The swallows and fish diminish their number every minute. These will become, in their turn, the prey of some tyrant of the air or water, and man, for his amusement or his needs, will kill their murderers. Nature is an inexplicable problem. It exists on a principle of destruction. Every being must be the tireless instrument of death to others, or itself must cease to live. Yet nonetheless, we celebrate the day of our birth, and we praise God for having entered such a world. During my soliloquy, I picked a flower at my side. It was fair and freshly opened, but an ugly caterpillar had hidden itself among the petals, and already they were shriveling and fading. Sad image of the earth and its inhabitants, I exclaimed. This worm lives only to injure the plant that protects it. Why was it created? And why was man created? He torments, he kills, he devours, he suffers, dies, is devoured. There you have his whole story. It is true that there is a heaven for the saint, but the saint leaves enough misery here below to send him even before the throne of God. I threw the flower to earth. At that moment, the universe appeared to me, a vast machine constructed only to produce evil. I almost doubted the goodness of God in not annihilating man on the day he first sinned. The world should have been destroyed, I said, crushed as I crush this reptile, which has done nothing in its life but render all that it touches as disgusting as itself. Let's pause there. Are you feeling good yet? You'd have to be a sadist. Schopenhauer is probably grinning like a ninny, and the rest of us are lying in a heap back in the ditch with a towel over our head. But here we Go. Here comes the twist. Here comes the redemption. Back to the essay. I had scarcely removed my foot from the poor insect when, like a censoring angel sent from heaven, there came fluttering through the trees, a butterfly with large wings of lustrous gold and purple. It shone but a moment before my eyes. Then, rising among the leaves, it vanished into the height of the azure vault. I was mute, but an inner voice said to me, let not the creature judge his Creator. Here is a symbol of the world to come. As the ugly caterpillar is the origin of the splendid butterfly, so this globe is the embryo of a new heaven and a new Earth, whose porous beauty will infinitely exceed your mortal imagination. And when you see the magnificent result of that which seems so base to you now, how you will scorn your blind presumption in accusing omniscience for not having made nature perish in her infancy. God is the God of justice and mercy. Then surely every grief that he inflicts on his creatures, be they human or animal, rational or irrational, every suffering of our unhappy nature is only a seed of that divine harvest which will be gathered when sin, having spent its last drop of venom, death having launched its final shaft, both will perish on the pyre of a universe in flames and leave their ancient victims to an eternal empire of happiness and glory. That's the end of the essay. Okay? Emily finds the hope in God and Heaven. Trust that if you'd like, or trust us Democracy society to come back around and rebuild itself on a pile of ashes. A society devoted to caring and community and truth and justice and joy. However you get there, choose hope. Choose hope. Dylan Thomas with John Goodby after this.

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[Jack Wilson]

Joining me now is John Goodby who.

[John Goodby]

Is a professor of arts and culture at Sheffield Hallam University in the uk. He's an expert on Dylan Thomas, including his work as the editor of Thomas's Collected Poems. And he's here today to discuss his biography of Dylan Thomas for the Critical Live series by Reaction Books, which he co authored with Chris Wigginton. John Goodby, welcome to the history of literature.

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Thank you, Jack. It's a pleasure and a privilege to be here.

[John Goodby]

So we know Dylan Thomas in the States. He's one of the more famous poetic names we have. And of course he had a famous stretch in America that we can talk about later. But I wanted to ask you about his presence in the uk, kind of where he stands these days. And maybe we can start with you and how you encountered Dylan Thomas. And maybe we should start with where you grew up.

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Well, I grew up in Birmingham, which is in the English woodlands and a little way from where Thomas lived, which is Wales, Swansea. So I had this English Mastiff called Mr. Hellings, who had come from Swansea and who had actually been a poet in his earlier years during the 1930s and had actually met Dylan Thomas once and Thomas mentioned him in his letters. So I had this English Master for, you know, A levels, which was when I'm 16, 17. And he introduced me to Dylan Thomas really. In fact, he had in the school library a little cupboard full of books which he'd allow certain pupils to have a look at. And among those books there was, there was Joyce, there was Windham Lewis, but there was also quite a lot of Dylan Thomas and he books out to me. So I got a kind of early introduction to Dylan Thomas. Although he wasn't a set poet, he wasn't on any of the courses I took, either level or A level. And he wasn't set at university either. I didn't encounter him when I did my English degree at Hull University. So more or less sidelined in the English curriculum at that point, which would be the mid-1970s, but probably still on the curriculum in Wales.

[John Goodby]

Right. That's what I was wondering, if he was kind of known throughout the uk or if he was just predominantly known these days in Wales. If he's somebody that school children are given his poems to learn or memorize or anything, or if. If that part of his career has sort of faded.

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Yeah, well, there's a kind of dual life to Dylan Thomas fame. I think it's part of the way he locks into popular culture. I would say that if you ask the average person on the street now to name a 20th century poet in this country, in Britain, Dylan Thomas is one of the very few names. They could come up with maybe one, two or three names, you know, T.S. eliot might be another, but that would be about it. So popular knowledge of him as a figure is still quite widespread and that's because of the way that 1960s pop culture picked him up, film musicians and so on. But as a poet who is read, it would be less than it was, say, 40 or 50 years ago, I think. On the other hand, works like Under Milk Wood, which isn't a poem, it's a radio play, has been broadcast many times. It's, you know, still being rebroadcast. And then there are his short stories, which, you know, give him a different dimension. They're still out there too. So it's a bit hard to pin down. And it has a kind of dual aspect. He's not taught very widely, but he is known, if that makes sense.

[John Goodby]

Right, sure. And kind of for the figure. And maybe we. That's a question I wanted to ask you about, is kind of the portrayals and some of the stereotypical portrayals. But let's focus on the poetry a little bit at first. So when you were introduced to him by your instructor who had this personal connection with Dylan Thomas, what were your impressions initially of his poetry?

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Well, I've got to be honest, Jack, I was pretty baffled. I mean, I was intrigued and attracted, but I was baffled. I think anybody who kind of dives into the Collected Poems will know what I'm talking about because there are poems there which grab you straight away and you generally work out what they mean.

[John Goodby]

Fern Hill, for example, or do not go gentle into that good night.

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Yeah, and there are about half a dozen poems like that. And then there's a layer which is kind of semi permeable, let's say you get a bit of it, but not all of it. And then there are poems that are just frankly incomprehensible, or seem to be, you know, like Alter wise, Owl wise, let's say, or now, which is a very, very strange poem and which his friend Vernon Watkins advised him not to publish in his second collection. He said that the critics will pounce on this poem and ignore the good ones. And Thomas's response to that was, let them have a bone, you know, and he went ahead with it and he published it anyway. So I was baffled and attracted at the same time. Because I think one of the things about Dylan Thomas poetry is that even if you don't understand, has an appeal that's always a musical and a rhythmic appeal, an intensity, a color, let's say, which draws you in, which attracts you. So I think this is what TS Eliot was talking about when he said that you can understand good poetry or you can get into good poetry without having to fully understand it at some other level than complete comprehension. So that was my initial response to Thomas.

[John Goodby]

Yeah.

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And I suspect it's the response that a lot of people have now.

[John Goodby]

In the introduction, it talks about Dylan Thomas as being a follower of the Joycean revolution of the word. Would you say that this is something that people who are reading these more difficult to understand Dylan Thomas poems? That that would be a good way of framing what he's doing, that he's kind of inheriting something from James Joyce and his use of language?

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Yeah, I think so. Because, you know, so often the poems are actually about language. They're about their own as poems. That phrase is always a good one to bear in mind when you're reading Thomas. I think it comes from a critic and editor called Eugene Jolas, who published this magazine called Transition in Paris in the late 1920s and early 1930s. And Jolass's magazine was dedicated to publishing cutting edge writing, really. So the early Surrealist writings were in there, poets like Paul Elouard and Andre Breton, for example. But he also carried instalments of the work that James Joyce was then working on, which is his last novel, Finnegan's Wake. And these would come as installments in Transition, and they would be called Work in Progress because Joyce refused to reveal the title of the novel until he completed it. And we know that Thomas had a very strong attraction to Joyce. He was probably the most influential contemporary writer on what he did. So there's no doubt that he was an important factor in the formation of Thomas's style. He even nods to it in his own work. For example, you know, his collection of short stories published in 1940, it's called portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, which is a kind of Joyce's Bildungsroman. Yeah, he's autobiographical novel portrayed the artist as a young man. So he goes from young man to young dog, probably signifying that you shouldn't take him as seriously as James Joyce. But at the same time, you know, the connection is there. And Thomas relates to Joyce in all sorts of ways, you know, the closer you look at it, for a start, you know, their freedom and their invention in their use of language. To go back to this book about the revolution of the word, why is it that Joyce had such virtuosity in the English language beyond that of any English writer of the time? And it's partly because he comes from a different culture. He comes from Ireland. And underneath the English language in Ireland is the substrate of Irish, Irish Gaelic, which works more freely and easily, as it were, with the English language. It takes more liberties. And the same can be said for Thomas. I think in Wales, you have the Welsh language not spoken as widely now as it used to be, but 20% of the speakers are Welsh speaking. Thomas's parents were Welsh speaking, although they didn't pass it on to him or to his sister Nancy. But it's there beneath the surface, and it means that South Walean uses of English can be more extravagant, more virtuosic, more rule bending than those of, you know, straightforward Home Counties English, let's say.

[John Goodby]

Right.

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There's a great phrase by the American critic Carl Shapiro where he says that Dylan Thomas was able to bend the iron of English, in other words, you know, subvert its standard syntax and collocations and usages in order to make his own peculiar style. So when we look at the connection between Thomas and Joyce, and Joyce's influence that way that Joyce had, you know, particularly in Ulysses and in Finnegan's Wake of messing about the language, of using, you know, reworked cliches of punning coming up, you know, coining his own words. That's there in Thomas as well, I think. And, you know, the punishment, I think, is central to Thomas. It becomes a kind of key factor in his poetry, you know, from about 1934 onwards, when he's 19, 20 or so. And sometimes whole poems will be built around the way that a word can face in two or three different directions, right? So we take. We get the general impression. And in his prose writings too, you can see the. The Joycean strain, because we've got to remember that as well, as writing poetry, Thomas was also a very good short story writer.

[John Goodby]

So what was it that appealed to you about Dylan Thomas's works? Did you see it as an invigorating challenge to decipher the meanings of some of these works? Or were you drawn to the musicality or, or the figure of Dylan Thomas as an individual poet? Or why did you decide to make Dylan Thomas the focus of your scholarship?

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Yeah, that's a really good question. I suppose it's a mixture of reasons and some of those would be rather perverse, by which I mean that I did it because there was nobody else doing it or that I thought that were doing it at the time, had maybe got it a little bit wrong. But, but first of all, you know, my initial adolescent take on Dylan Thomas didn't last that long. You know, it wasn't taught at university, as I said. So I kind of dropped Thomas for, for a while. And as an academic, you know, when I became a lecturer in my late 20s, which would be in the 1980s, I was focused on Irish poetry. That was my specialism. I didn't have any at that time. And then I got a job and I moved in Swansea itself and I moved from Cork University in Ireland, which is where I'd been at that time, to Wales and after a couple of years started to get a little bit not tired of Irish poetry. But I was looking around for other things. So I was in my late late 30s at the time and it just so happened that there was someone in the department who'd done a bit of work, Gillen Thomas, and he gave me a copy of a paper that he'd written and I thought, I don't think this says everything about that poem and maybe I could do better. Which was perhaps slightly arrogant, you know, an Englishman coming in, the specialist in Irish poetry to boot, saying I want to take on this Welsh poet. But I did, and with the help of a PhD student at the time, who's Chris Winginton, who helped co write this book with me, we put together a little conference. This would be in 98, 1998. And what we felt the attraction of Thomas was at that point was that although there had been a lot of really good writing on him, most of it American, it should be said, in the 50s and the 60s. And there was still a few, you know, a handful of Welsh critics who were doing useful work on Thomas. There was Ralph Maude, for example, and Walford Davis and John Ackerman, but that would be about it. And they were of a much older generation, they were guys are in their 60s. We thought, well, maybe we can connect Thomas to all the new developments in English studies that are going on at the moment. You know, feminism, for example, or studies about literature and the body, or deconstruction, that kind of thing. And that was what we tried to bring out at the conference that we had. It was only a two or three day affair, but it was in Swansea and we got some really good papers and we decided to put those together as a book. And it's at that point that this thing took off for me. So it was a bit of late development and it was basically about getting Thomas to interact with the new kinds of critical study and theory that had grown up in English studies in the 1970s and 1980s and that had missed Thomas. They'd overlooked Thomas. They hadn't had anything to do with him up to that point. But of course, just to go back to what you said in your question about the appeal of Thomas at that gut level. It had always been there, you know, even though I'd sort of put him to one side in my teens, I'd always wanted to discover what the secret of his appeal was, because, as I say, he's at once very baffling and incredibly appealing. So I suppose I felt that this was the opportunity to do that, you know, that Chris Wigginson and I put a book together. It was published in 2001, mainly consisted of essays based on the papers that we'd had in our conference three years before. And I thought we were going some way towards unpicking, you know, what this precise appeal of Thomas was. So it was a challenge. I think that's a word you used. It was a challenge to see if I could get to grips with Thomas's work. I also felt as well that there was a kind of battle to be fought on his behalf, let's say, because back in the 50s and the 60s and the 70s, Thomas was a big name, you know, he was. He was written about, he was discussed critically, he had this massive popular reputation and he had a big critical reputation as well that matched it. But then in the late 70s in Britain and in America, he sort of fell out of view. Now in America, I think there were very good reasons for that. American critics discovered their own great, you know, post war schools of poetry, the Black Mountain Poets and the New York poets and the Beats and so on. So that's understandable. Why would you focus on Dylan Thomas? You already said a lot about him, but in England and Britain it was rather different. And there was a kind of conservative backlash, saying that with a small C as well as with a capital C. In the late 70s, you know, Margaret Thatcher came to power, but there was a conservative cultural atmosphere as well. And all of a sudden, Thomas became, you know, somebody to be looked down upon, someone almost to be despised, somebody who's a figure of excess, almost a sort of clown. And English critics in particular saw him as beneath themselves. And, you know, they sort of relegated him. They wrote him out of critical histories of the 1930s. The 1930s became all about Auden. He was, you know, the main man. And anybody who didn't relate to or write his kind of poetry was out. And, of course, Thomas is the antithesis of Orden, really. Right, right. And. And so he had to be expunged from the official histories. And that's what happened. You know, he. You read histories of 1930s poetry and writing produced in the 1980s and 1990s. Thomas is seen either as this kind of lame brain, sort of excessive poet, a person who it's best not to say too much about, always completely erased. And he's dumped into the 1940s and the 1940s, then as a whole decade is written off as the dire decade of excess and expressionist poetry that goes over the top. And Thomas is seen as the sort of the bad founding figure of this awful school of new apocalyptic poetry of the 1940s. So part of what I was doing was an attempt to redeem him, if you like, from that obligatory and that neglect. And it wasn't as though he was not understandable because a lot of critics in the 50s and 60s had actually explained how his poetry worked. It was a kind of willed forgetting on the part of, let's say, upper middle class English critics, Oxbridge, metropolitan English critics, who didn't want to have much to do with Thomas, who was buying the ointment of their narrative. And conversely, there was a kind of matching reaction in Wales by the 1990s with the rise of the Welsh nationalism in literary studies there. Thomas was seen as beyond the pale there as well. So you have this kind of weird situation in which Thomas was seen by English critics as too Welsh and by Welsh critics as too English. And, you know, he occasionally said disparaging things about Wales, so he didn't fit there either. And I suppose I took him on because nobody else wanted him. And I could see he was a really, really terrific poet who needed a certain amount of advocacy. So there we are. Very mixed responses to your question.

[John Goodby]

Yeah, let's take a Quick break. And then I want to come back with a discussion of Dylan Thomas, the person, and how his image might have played into some of these trends and kind of his ups and downs in the public mind that you've been discussing.

[Nerds Advertiser]

Okay. Yeah.

[John Goodby]

Okay, we're back. So, John Goodby, you've got a phrase or a sentence I wanted to read here in the introduction that says this biography breaks with the soft focus figure, beloved of the cottage industry that has grown up around Thomas and the equally caricatural dismissal of him as a drunken windbag that is still rehearsed occasionally by critics and reviewers. And then you talk about how in the last 20 years there's been a slow replacement of these stereotypes with a different Dylan Thomas. So maybe you could talk a little bit about the. Just flesh out those stereotypical portrayals for us and then we can talk about the Dylan Thomas that has emerged from more recent critical appraisals.

[Nerds Advertiser]

Sure, yeah. Okay, Jack. I mean, this is another really good question, I think, because most people come to Thomas through the legend, the myth, and that conditions their reading. I mean, for one thing, it means that they seek out poems which seem to be autobiographical, you know, like. Or do not go gentle. And they don't look at the poems which are more abstract, but which might be more representative of him. So the myth, the legend of man is really crucial.

[John Goodby]

And in America, it's the guy at the White Horse Tavern who's, you know, it's probably closer to the drunken windbag often where it's like he's a hard drinker. He's kind of a throwback, romantic type of poet who can touch popular chords, but who is ultimately more of a showman than a serious poet.

[Nerds Advertiser]

Yeah, that's right. I mean, there is the famous anecdote, isn't there, of him going back to the Chelsea Hotel and sort of bragging to the doorman, I've just drunk 18 double whiskeys. I believe that's the record. And then sort of collapsing in a heap three days later and ending up in a coma and dying. I mean, that is the way that people still tend to remember Thomas. And it has to be said that, you know, he created a Persona of which that was part and which didn't do many favors. In fact, it came back to bite him in the end because he was treated for alcoholism in the hospital, whereas what was really wrong with him was pneumonia. Research suggests that this was what killed him, not the alcohol. But yeah, the myth and the legend of Thomas is double edged. You know, it draws people In. But at the same time it limits their appreciation, as I said, to purely automatic readings or to these readings of him as more of a performer than as a serious poet. And what we try to do in the. In the biography, Chris Wigginton and I, is read the life through the poems. There are other biographies out there and they occur, you know, regular intervals. One in the 60s, one in the 70s, one in 2003, which was the 50th anniversary of his death. And they all tend to see the poetry as somehow ancillary to the light, as a sort of thing he did off on the side when he wasn't roistering, when the reality, if you look at how he divided up his hours, as it were, is the opposite. He was a professional writer. You know, you do not write the quantity of poetry, the short stories, the radio features, even the letters that he wrote. There are a thousand letters in the collected of the letters. You do not write all of that stuff if you're permanently soused or even if you're, you know, drunk a good deal of the time. You just can't do it. And if you look at his day to day records, yes, he's capable of excess. Aren't we all? And sometimes he goes further than most people. But most of the time he is concentrated on being a professional writer, meeting deadlines, getting stuff out, marketing himself even, which he was very good at. But as I say, he did it through his Persona, which bit him, particularly later on. So the legend is this thing we thought that needed to be deconstructed. In some ways it's a very appealing one. Dylan Thomas is the poet you probably like to hang out with, you know, if you wanted to go for a drink. And he. It's the sort of person who, you know, you might take to a party. He's beloved of film stars and rock stars.

[John Goodby]

Yeah. Is that the soft focus figure that you meant? Beloved of the cottage industry? The one that's sort of like. Well, he's sort of a modern day Heathcliff or something. He's this dark romantic figure who is fun to be around and who is making a life out of poetry in this interesting artistic way and kind of the guy you'd love to see at the pub because he'd be full of great storytelling and a lot of laughter and maybe some tears.

[Nerds Advertiser]

Yeah. There's a slight distinction perhaps between what I'm saying about him as being the poet of choice for rock stars and film stars and so on, and the cottage industry side of it. I suppose what I'M trying to get at with that last phrase is the way that he tends to be marketed now in Wales, where he's seen as a sort of extent of the tourist industry, you know, and what, what they do is focus on his final works, particularly Under Milk Wood, which is very easy to understand. It's a genial radio play, a comedy, a play for voices, as he called it, which is full of entertainment and humour and is very straightforward. Or the later poems, such as Fern Hill, which give a kind of rose tinted vision of his own childhood. So that plays into the sort of cottage industry side of things. And I don't have any trouble with that existing, except that it tends to be foregrounded at the expense of Thomas, the serious poet or serious fiction writer. So, you know, I'm at odds with that to some extent, I have to admit, and sometimes we cross swords over that. But in general, one of the things that is interesting about Thomas is the way that he managed the crossover between a popular audience and a very esoteric academic audience. He's one of the few poets who actually manages to do that. And I think that's unusual in itself. It comes down to when he was born and where he was born, of course, but also to the development of new media during his lifetime. So, for example, he doesn't just write poems, he doesn't just write short stories, he writes radio features. He also writes film scripts. During the Second World War, he was working for an outfit called Strand Films, whose remit was basically to write propaganda scripts for the British government. And Thomas churned them out. He wrote about 15 or 16 film scripts, mainly shorts, but one or two of them more ambitious. And then after the Second World War finished, he was basically taken on by a couple of film companies on a retainer to write and doctor scripts for them. And that lasted up until about 1948, 49, when the British film industry sank more or less in competition with Hollywood. But on top of that, then you've got things like Bespoken lp, for example, another new media form which emerged in the early 1950s. And Thomas was at the forefront of that. When I think he was on his second American tour, he was approached by a couple of young women who were setting up a spoken word record company called cademon. They were making use of the latest LP technology, long playing record technology, and they recorded Thomas and brought out their first disc with Thomas Reading in 1952. So he's there at the beginning of the spoken word industry as well, you know, with LPs and finally you know, just to add another mass media form, he actually made two television programs in the year of his death, 1953. Reprehensibly, the BBC lost their recordings of these. So we don't have any images of Thomas on tv, but there you go. It's another form of mass media that he was engaging with. And really at quite a high level. You know, there were millions of listeners to his BBC programs. And I think the cableman records had sold about 400,000 LPs by the early 1960s. So this was what magnified his appeal and his fame. And it shows him sort of straddling these, you know, very different worlds. The esoteric high art, modernist world of difficult, obscure poetry and mass appeal. So I don't deny the cottage industry completely, and certainly not the kind of wider appeal through popular culture and so on. He was the favorite poet of John Lennon, for example, and he appears on the COVID of Sgt. Pepper's album. That stuff is My Attitude. That would be what? Why not? You know, it gets people in. There's no point in being snobbish about it because Thomas himself was not a snob. And, you know, this is one of the appeals he has, I think he clearly does not look down on a mass audience or on popular forms of entertainment and communication.

[John Goodby]

Right. And in addition to John Lennon, I think Robert Zimmerman decided to go with the name Bob Dylan based on his love for Dylan Thomas.

[Nerds Advertiser]

I think certain Robinson did do that, although he's denying it even to this day, I think. But, you know, there's nowhere else it could have come from. Yeah. And, you know, part of the Persona, I think, is based on Dylan Thomas. Rambunctious and furious and so on.

[John Goodby]

Right.

[Nerds Advertiser]

Yeah. Deep into popular culture and pop culture, I think Dylan Thomas, in a way, he. He kind of becomes a patron Saint of the 60s, as though he died 10 years before he should have. Because if he hung around, you know, into the area, the era of pop culture and psychedelia and so on and, you know, sexual permissiveness, he would have been a kind of, you know, patron saint. He would have been the uncrowned king of the kids. But he didn't quite make it. So he becomes a kind of martyr or icon instead of sort of living presence.

[John Goodby]

Right. So let's back up and talk about how he got to the point where he would be selected for these radio broadcasts and the new technology and so on. Your book, you set out his childhood from 1914 to 1925 and what you call the apprentice years from 1925. To 1932. So this kind of covers the first 18 years or so of Thomas's life. What kind of life was he living? What were his circumstances, and how did those point the way toward the person that he would eventually become?

[Nerds Advertiser]

So if we're talking about his childhood, it was a happy one. He had a. He had a sister who was about eight years older than him, Nancy. And he had good, loving parents. His father was rather austere and distant, but his mother was very, very cozy and loving and spoiled him. He was the youngest of the two children. He was the baby of the family, and he was indulged, you know. And we see in his childhood a kind of blissful enjoyment, really, of his childhood years, but also emerging a mischievous street, too, which made him more endearing, I suppose, in some ways. So he was good and naughty at the same time, you know, indulging practical jokes, truancing, smoking, that kind of thing. Studying hard in his own subject, you know, immersed in poetry, but going out with the. The rough lads as well and getting into trouble sometime. So there's a sort of duality emerging even then, I suppose. One of the things we have to understand is that his father was actually the English master at the school he went to. And he was a failed poet in his way. DJ Thomas. Jack Thomas, who tried to pass on to his son his own aspirations, I think, as a poet and as an English teacher. And Thomas recalls having Shakespeare read to him and poetry read to him by his father when he was just a boy, you know, a child, really, and couldn't understand it, but having it, as it were, roll over him just as the rhythms of the church and the sermons and the hymns and of Welsh Calvinism rolled over him when his mother took him to the chapel on a Sunday. And he was getting these dual influences which were making what he would become. But there's a sort of, not an antagonism but a strained relationship with his father in the sense that he's trying to live up to his father's ideals. He wants to become a poet, but in a sense that also means that he's not going to be that good at school, where his father is a teacher and he focuses on English and virtually nothing else. So he doesn't pass the matriculation exam, which he takes when he's 15, and he doesn't go to university. He doesn't go to Oxford or Cambridge, which was what his father wanted him to do. So there's a kind of tension there in which his father encourages him to be a Poet, but the product, the focus of the poet isn't something that is conducive to the rest of Jack Thomas's ambitions. Out of that, you know, Thomas leaves school early. He becomes a journalist briefly for the local paper and he enjoys it. He's reporting on some very boring stories, but he's also being taken out and shown around the bars by the senior lecturers, getting to the centre of town and so on. And the other input, perhaps the other big input at the time, is amateur theatre. From an early age, Thomas was interested in drama and he joined the YMCA theater group, the local YMCA group, and he joined something called the Swansea Players, Little theater in Swansea, which was almost a semi professional outfit. And this would be when he was 17, 18, 19, he was following his sister's footsteps because she was one of the actors there as well. And he was part of the plays, you know, he was rehearsing, he was learning lines, he was learning scripts, he was acting. He's going out with his fierce company to towns around Swansea. And it was part of his growing up, it's part of his socializing. And so this feeds into his poetry as well, which is often inherently dramatic and often draws on, you know, Shakespeare and other Jacobean playwrights as part of its source material. So this is what sets him up partly for the evolution of his poetic style, which we can trace, you know, fortunately, and it's quite a rare thing because most poets destroy their juvenilia. We can trace through a series of notebooks which have been preserved that he kept from the age of 15 onwards, where he's trying quite consciously to make himself into a modernist poet. He's trying to get away from the light verse that he writes for his friends and his family and to entertain people, people and to become a modernist poet. And there are five of these notebooks extant. One of them was lost until 2014, but the four that were known about and were deposited at State University of New York in Buffalo back in 1941 show this progress towards his mature style, which he arrived at very early. You know, most poets take their 20s, maybe their 30s, to get to a mature style, but in Dylan Thomas's case, it occurred in his late teens, really. So we find him writing a poem like and Death shall have no Dominion when he's just 18 in April 1933. And then the force through the green fuse drives the flower he wrote just after his 19th birthday. So he arrives at this mature stunt very, very early, and he publishes his first book when he's 20, and it launches him into literary London. And there's this kind of incredibly accelerated trajectory then that you see with Dylan Thomas through the 1930s, which sees him going through various levels of success and celebrity and fame until by the end of his life he's almost a kind of household name in some way ways. And he's conquered the American lecture circuit.

[John Goodby]

I'm struck by this idea of somebody who is so much in the public eye and so well known and so forth, especially when we're talking about a poet. And yet there's such different conceptions of him. And none of them are maybe quite right in that your new biography has needed to kind of correct.

[Jack Wilson]

How did Dylan Thomas see himself?

[John Goodby]

And do you think his self portrait, so to speak, was accurate?

[Nerds Advertiser]

This is another great question. I think for a start, there's more than one Dylan Thomas. But Constantine Fitzgibbon, who was his first biographer and the only one to know Thomas personally, said this about his, you know, his subject when he was writing that biography in the 60s, said I started out, you know, thinking that I would discover maybe two or three different Dylan's when I began researching this biography. But I ended up finding out there were more like six or eight of them. And I think this is part of the thing about Dylan Thomas. He's a multiple Persona. He could be very up, he could be very down, he very sociable, very introverted, could be very kind. He could even on occasions be cruel. And it's very difficult to say this is the Dylan Thomas. And he adopted that kind of Persona or set of personae as a sort of, you know, self dramatization almost. I'm going back to the. The references to theater I made earlier. But also because he's a young provincial guy without a university education on the make in London, literary London. He's very young, you know, he's only 20, 21 at this time. When he arrives on the scene, how does he cope? And he does it by splitting himself. I think he develops different personalities which will suit these different occasions that he has to deal with. Drink is a lubricant in all of that. And so we get a kind of multiplicity of selves. And I think he knew that although he wasn't completely in control of those selves. If you look at his letters, for example, which are probably the best way of coming at him as a person, probably better than any biography, in fact, his letters, whoever he's writing to, he kind of. He develops a different, a slightly different tone of voice. It's always Dylan, but he's pitching it to the recipient. And he is, he's playing a role. You know, none of his letters are boring and this is, you know, revealed in the fact that so many of them survived. The people who received them never threw them away or hardly ever. So there are a thousand pages of them, as I say. And it's. It's a reflection of his ability to dramatize himself. He's a chameleonic personality. I think that partly goes back to, you know, where he's from. He's Anglo, Welsh, you know, he's an English speaker, he doesn't speak Welsh, He's a hyphenated identity, if you like, and he's aware of that. And Swansea itself, I don't know if you know anything about it, Jack, but it's a seaport and it's on the edge of various kind of dividing lines. So for example, it's on the edge of the industrial belt of South Wales and the rural area of Carmarthen just to the west of it. It's on that kind of dividing line that cuspid. Similarly, it's on the linguistic dividing line, or was in the 1920s and 30s between Welsh speaking Wales, which was out in the countryside, and English speaking Wales. And being a seaport, it's on that kind of elemental divide between land and sea. So there's a hybrid and conflicting sort of aspect to the place itself, which I think is embodied in Dylan Thomas. He kind of absorbed it and rather than saying, well, this is a disability, this is something that holds me back. Being pulled in these different directions, he was able to turn it into something that worked for him. He used it as a source of his power. So we often find in his poetry and his writing kind of in betweenness, which is maybe connected to this kind of chameleonic performance. Often his poems set on the beach, on the shore, you know, between the land and the sea. A kind of. Nope, disappear when the tide comes in. It'll be revealed again when the tide goes out. So a lot of his poems are facing the sea, which is the ultimate symbol of mutability and change, which is often what his poems are about. Process, change, the way that nothing is as it appears and is inevitably going to become something else.

[John Goodby]

Do you think that there is.

[Nerds Advertiser]

A.

[John Goodby]

Dylan Thomas that's going to survive or last the longest? Do you think there's a particular conception of him or particular works of his that are going to govern how people view him, let's say 50 years from now?

[Nerds Advertiser]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure his stuff will be around in 50 years from now, people will still be reading him. I think the reputation may not have changed that much from the way it is now. Under Milkwood will always be a favorite Fernhill poem in October, the Hunchback in the park and so on. These poems that deal with his childhood, all with elegy, Death shall have no Dominion and so on, those will still be around, and I think they'll probably be in the anthologies. Some of his short stories might be as well. You know, there are some great short stories for Peaches, for example, the Fight or One Warm Saturday. And they're in different styles like his poems. You know, there's a difficult batch of stories, his early ones, which are very similar to those difficult early poems, and then much more genial, humorous ones in Portrait of the Artist as Young Dog. So some of those will be about, I think that, you know, what I would like to see survive of him, and what I suspect will survive, but in a more kind of academic way, will be the poems that aren't as well known. And the difficult ones are a major response to high modernism. These are the poems in his first two or three collections. They are some of the greatest poems written in the 1930s and 1940s. Poems like I See the Boys Of Summer In Their Ruin or All and all or Once It Was the Colour of Saying Ultralized by Owlite Even after the Funeral Agree for Go. I mean, I could run through a whole gamut of poems which I think are great poems and which I think will survive, but only for the reader who's prepared to push beyond that initial sugar coating, you like, around the Pill, which is a bit more complex. So, yes, I think he'll survive, but I think it will be in this kind of bifurcated reception of him as, you know, a popular entertainer, a popular poet, but also as a very deep and profound one. I think one thing that is changing now. You mentioned how the last 20 years have seen a revaluation of Tom's. And I think one thing that will change is that people will see him as more Central to the 1930s than in the past, so he will regain some of that former status that he had in the 50s and the 60s. I don't think he'll ever be quite as famous or as popular as he was back then, but he clearly persists in popular culture at some level. There are various lines of his which have become memes and are out there in the world of the Internet, will stay there forever. So there are different kinds of survival. I mean, Occasionally he's even taken up in ads. There's a Volkswagen ad from 2007. Somebody going for a night drive in their Volkswagen Golf with the. The background of nighttime LA behind them, you know, and all of this is overlaid by Richard Burton turning Under Milk Wood and the dreams of the sleepers at the beginning of that piece. And it works brilliantly. You know, Thomas will always be intermeshed, I think, with pop culture and in commercial culture.

[John Goodby]

Yeah, right. And as someone who, you know, is my age and grew up the way I did, they would sort of cringe at that and say, oh, no, they're commercializing this poet. But my understanding is that the younger generations would say, well, that's great for Dylan Thomas. It helps his brand. And if you can make it into the commercial and that can keep you in the public eye, that's a good thing for a poet.

[Nerds Advertiser]

Well, yeah. I mean, there aren't any poets that do this, really, are there? I mean, you can look at T.S. eliot's poems about cats. About cats, but nothing else. And part of me, of course, it as well, I must say, Jack, you know, I would like him to be used for dignified purposes, too. But you can't complain if it's the gateway to something else. And often it is. And maybe he wouldn't have survived this long if he hadn't had that interest from celebrity and popular culture more generally. So, yeah, I get where you're coming from. I think we're of a similar generation. And I would like people to read the difficult poems, which I think are the more interesting ones a lot more than they do, and not just stay on the surface, but you just have to go with what's there, I think, and keep trying to push out the more interesting, more complex, more varied version of Dylan that exists.

[John Goodby]

Right, okay. Well, this has been illuminating. John Goodby, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.

[Nerds Advertiser]

You're welcome, Jack. It's been a pleasure and a privilege, as I said, really enjoyed it. Thanks.

[John Goodby]

Okay, that's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature.

[Jack Wilson]

My thanks to John Goodby for joining me for that scintillating discussion, and to Dylan Thomas for giving us the raw material to discuss. And to Emily Bronte speaking of raw material for her. Thanks to her for her darkness and her light.

[John Goodby]

We have Fernando Pessoa coming up next time. Thomas Kyd is coming up soon.

[Jack Wilson]

And a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald and some poetry of Emily Dickinson. Speaking of Emily's and butterflies, which I don't mind doing, whether it's the Bronte or the Dickinsonian variety.

[John Goodby]

Charles Chestnut is coming up.

[Jack Wilson]

D.H. lawrence, John Ruskin, Amazing Worlds, Science Fiction, Sylvia Plath. Oh, the places we will go together, you and me. Dear listener, I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.

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