Reprinted from Folk Tales.
One man, one life, one oeuvre of poetry. Two vastly different books.
Both of these slim volumes pay tribute to the brilliant and all-too-brief career of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. And though both obviously cover the same biographical territory, the authors’ foci could not be more divergent.
Read’s biography has a casual, comfortable feel to it (played up, in part, by someone’s choice to use odd spacing throughout the book and huge, childlike fonts for the chapter headings), and is, by far, the more easily digested of the two books. Written in a very straightforward manner, the book follows Thomas’s life chronologically from birth, through his career, to his untimely death in the United States in the early 1950s. A succinct chronology is provided at the beginning of the book, highlighting significant meetings, publications and family events. Furthermore, each chapter is devoted to people, places and events significant to Thomas as well as his development as a poet and a person.
Read provides a wealth of information about Thomas from the flattering (his lifelong relationships with friends and family, his multi-faceted talents, his apparent conviviality) to the brutally honest (his troubles with alcohol, money, adultery and depression), enlivened by quotes from friends, family, and even Thomas himself.
Fully a third of the book is given over to maps and pictures, both of Thomas and his beloved Wales, and of himself and others.
Of course, there is the poetry, laid out among the text with minimal interpretation and serving as a reminder of Thomas’s profession, but not so intrusive as to seem a treatise. On the whole, the book is a pleasant glimpse into a fascinating, albeit short (and not always pleasant) life.
By contrast, Ackerman’s book is clearly of academic origin (Ackerman was a Senior Lecturer at a British college when the book was published). This book is the final of three the author devoted to Thomas, this one specifically focused on Dylan Thomas as Welshman. Ackerman desires to demonstrate how Wales, and being Welsh, affected the growth and development of Thomas’s poetry. He is successful only in part.
While Ackerman clearly demonstrates the growth and the improvement in Thomas’s poetry as he grew older, and clearly demonstrates the significant bond between Thomas and the land of his birth, he does not satisfactorily tie the two threads together, save in his discussion of Under Milkwood, one of Thomas’s last significant works (a play, rather than a poem).
Ackerman’s biography of Thomas is sketchier than Read’s, and less fleshed out. His focus is as much on the places with which Thomas was acquainted as the people he knew. Furthermore, he skips around chronologically, sometimes making it difficult to correctly place Thomas (and his relationship to Wales or anything/anyone else) into context. There is considerable dissection of Thomas’s poetry as he attempts to make his point, and he sometimes covers pages in doing so, making for a slow read.
While not unpleasant, Ackerman’s biography lacks the charm and enthusiasm of the Read book, and left me wishing the author had perhaps collapsed his three-volume set into one, laying the whole picture out at once.
(McGraw-Hill Paperbacks, 1964)
(Granada Publishing Limited, 1979)
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