The collected letters.

The Collected Letters, by Dylan Thomas,

DYLAN THOMAS, who died in an alcoholic coma at the age of 39, declared: "I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me." Astonishingly precocious and fluent as well as tedious and verbose, he admitted: "I get high-flown and flyblown and flyfalutin if I try very consciously not to be self-consicious." Cunning and clumsy ("I'm in town to wheedle . . . and live on guile and beer"), he was both a genial genius and a squalid sponger--as exciting and exasperating a correspondent as he was a friend. His honest account of his own defects of character included melancholy, bad temper, silences and disappearances, shyness and gaucheness, boredom and boorishness, "soulburn, heartdoubt, headspin," ignorance, whimsicality, and sloth.

Thomas required turbulence and even chaos to write, as others needed calm. He drank heavily to stimulate his writing, to ease himself down after a creative spurt, and to help forget his periods of sterility. Suffering devastating hangovers, he complained: "I have the villain of a headache, my eyes are two piss holes in the sand, my tongue is fish-and-chip paper."

He was expert at writing amusing apologies for outrageous behavior, often accompanied by a compensatory poem. He failed to appear at the wedding of his best friend, Vernon Watkins: "I know this hasty jumble can't explain all the somersaulting & backspinning of circumstance against my being where I most wanted to be"; robbed silver and furs from a borrowed flat: "We left so hurriedly, & with so little time to think, that we mayn't have tidied everything up." As he explained to one of his numerous benefactors: "Nobody, one might think, could say that he was sincerely sorry so many times and still be sincere about it."

Thomas deserves a complete edition of his letters but requires a selection, for they are extremely repetitious. This handsome, meticulously edited collection contains seven hundred new letters not included in Constantine FitzGibbon's volume of 1966, as well as fascinating bits of information in the footnotes. It is interesting, for example, to note the intimacy of the London literary world, and see how many minor writers were drawn to opposite poles and became friends of both Wyndham Lewis and Dylan Thomas. Thomas's correspondents included Edith Sitwell, T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, Lawrence Durrell, and Theodore Roethke. But the least posturing and pretentious letters were sent to his parents and to Vernon Watkins. After a negative review, Thomas condemned Dame Sitwell as a lying, concealing, "poisonous thing of a woman." When she changed her mind about his work a year later, he sickeningly said: "I loved and appreciated [your letter], and I'll owe you a lot always for your encouragement."

His endless requests for handouts from unknown patrons ("I live from poem to mouth") tend to be rather more formal and are complemented by copious regrets for failing to do the work that would have brought in the cash: "After all sorts of upheavals, evasions, promises, procrastinations, I write, very fondly, and fawning slightly, a short inaccurate summary of those events which caused my never writing a word."

Thomas's early letters describe the boredom of provincial life in Wales ("It's a flat, dull day, with grey rain oozing like self-pity"), his early efforts to get published in Adelphi and New Verse, his epistolary and then actual affair with the young novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson, who later married C. P. Snow. (Thomas also had a brief and somewhat surprising period of homosexuality in 1936.) He offers interesting explications of his obscure poetry and method of composition. Fighting his way up Parnassus, he lacerates past masters and present rivals. He wittily calls Wordsworth "a tea-time bore . . . the humorless, the platitudinizing reporter of Nature in her dullest moods." And he unfairly dismisses Auden as a public-school prototype: "the heavy, jocular prefect, the boy bushranger, the school wag, the sixth-form debater, the homosexual clique-joker."

The best letters express Thomas's love for his fiery Irish wife, Caitlin, and comically describe his first visits to Rapallo and to New York. In Italy, "the heat's like a live animal you fight against in the streets" and the acid red wine bites holes in his guts, which he plugs with spaghetti. In America, a "titanic dream world, soaring Babylon, everything monstrously rich and strange," he is merely a voice on wheels, earning and spending money, spilling his words and his seed, living the legend of the mad, self-destructive poet.

Thomas came from a powerful bardic tradition and had all the qualities of the doomed and damned Romantic hero: idealistic, tormented, rebellious. He gave charismatic public readings that transfixed his audience, but was rude and drunken, irresponsible and embarrassing, and swung from euphoria to depression. In the end, a sad ruin, he could exclaim: "Somebody's boring me--and I think it's me."