Forum / Dylan Thomas on the American Academe

• 
  James Lloyd Davis

  Jun 04, 04:42pm

  Dylan Thomas, on a whirlwind lecture tour through the US of A, wrote about his experience with remarkable candor. While researching my WIP novel about the McCarthy era and the beginnings of CIA, I ran across an article in Time Magazine from the issue dated May 17, 1954, a transcript from a broadcast the Welsh poet recorded for the BBC. Here is an excerpt:

  "He is vigorously welcomed at the station by an earnest, crew-cut platoon of giant collegiates, all chasing the butterfly culture with net, notebook, poison-bottle, pin and label, each with at least 36 terribly white teeth, and nursed away, as heavily gently as though he were an imbecile rich aunt with a short prospect of life, into a motorcar in which, for a mere 50 miles or so traveled at poet-breaking speed, he assures them of the correctness of their assumption that he is half-witted by stammering inconsequential answers in an over-British accent to their genial questions . . . He is then taken to a small party of only a few hundred people all of whom hold the belief that what a visiting lecturer needs before he trips on to the platform is just enough martinis so that he can trip off the platform as well. And, clutching his explosive glass, he is soon contemptuously dismissing, in a flush of ignorance and fluency, the poetry of those androgynous literary ladies with three names who produce a kind of verbal ectoplasm to order as a waiter dishes up spaghetti—only to find that the fiercest of these, a wealthy huntress of small, seedy lions (such as himself) ... is his hostess for the evening ...

  Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,860708,00.html#ixzz1wqFWeJyZ

  As the article states, "One month after recording his rollicking valedictory, at the beginning of (another) lecture tour (TIME, Nov. 16, 1953), Poet Thomas, 39, died in New York."

  He died of drink, but was not one to deny his addiction. He did, however, once say that, "An alcoholic is someone you don't like, who drinks as much as you do."

  I don't know if everyone here can access the archives to read the entire article, but the Time Magazine archive is a treasure worth cultivating. It comes with a subscription.

  PS: In the vein of drunken poet mythology, the is a delightful scene in the movie, Candy... (from the Terry Southern book of the same name, written with Mason Hoffenberg) ...that features a brilliant cameo from Richard Burton as a Dylanesque touring poet who goes through an entire day of drinking in one amazing, brief high-comedic scene. If you've never seen the movie, you should. I should say it's priceless.

  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062776/

• 
  Dolemite

  Jun 04, 05:08pm

  “You say you don’t understand Dylan Thomas? Yes, but your ganglion does, and your secret wits, and all your unborn children.”
  - Ray Bradbury

  Thanks for posting this, J.

• You must log in to reply to this thread.