Love, work and sleep


 


This is true:
Dylan Thomas was sauntering through London with a woman not his wife when he went into a pub. He and Theodora Rossyll sat down and Thomas started to doodle, which he did when he was in a bad mood. He was in a bad mood because of a man standing at the other end of the pub. The man walked over to Thomas, and put a sheet of paper down on the table. On it was an exact duplicate of the doodle Thomas had been drawing. Thomas leapt up and dragged Theodora out of the pub.
"What's wrong? What was all that about?" Theodora asked.
"You've just met Aleister Crowley," Thomas said angrily.

Andrew Lycett's biography of Dylan thomas is spiced with outrageous little chunks of the lattice of coincidences, like the fact that Thomas's older sister got married to a British military mad who had been previously married to Dwight Eisenhower's driver and mistress. It's so wonderful that you want it to relate to the rest of Dylan's life, and can understand why it's in the book even though guardians of the unities may furrow their brows in concern,

I had gotten to a point where I was reading entirely too much crap, and some of it was crap of the worst sort--the kind that sucks the joy out of better stuff. Lycett's book went a long way towards fixing that , not just with the sparkle of strange insight and anecdote, but with the the main course.
What rose up and gave me a smack in the narrative was that Dylan Thomas sweated over his poetry. Not simply worked hard--worked for ages on a single poem, and after his early period of creation, worked for years trying to reach the same effect unsuccessfully. He worked and worked and, in a flash of oversimplification, when it stopped working drank himself to death.
None of that is a big surprise in the life of a poet, and still less in a twice-removed-from-the-truth biography and thrice-removed generalization. But the thing about Dylan Thomas is that he fooled me completely. He fooled me in my raging youth when the greatest thing from my belief in myself to my hope of infinity was poetry and I knew I was a poet; and he fools me right now, with what I know, right in front of me. When I was charmingly ecstatic, Dylan Thomas was was a straight torrent of what I was ecstating towards. It was all so fluent in a voice I'd never heard before and knew with every callow romantic bone in my body; he seas now with authority and careless music.
Now I know, or thought I knew, carefully worked poetry: Eliot has very obviously put meticulous thought into every word of his, and when it works and he's right (for me, the Four Quartets) it's like a shining Greek temple as tall as Ararat. Auden is like that, and Rilke's careful polished enigmas. Thomas's stuff sounds like none of that> You don't learn stuff from him, as you can do with the other three. You don't borrow quotes from him to pepper your conversation., because it's not really your language, but another, better one. I read Dylan Thomas when I was young, and I wanted to learn that language.

Learning what I learned from Lycett,I was filled (though maybe half way--I am not a young man) with both wonder and pity. Dylan Thomas did not drink from Cerridwen's cauldron and have that magic language pour from his lips: he had to chip out the words to it letter by letter like Blake engraving a plate. Not magic, but work. Grinding, demanding work, that after a certain point, he found he couldn't do, not even to keep himself alive or to keep promises to those he loved.

It's made me feel better about work: the conventional wisdom, of course, is that there's craft and there's inspiration, and never the twain shall meet. And to be sure there are ecstatic singers riding the storm crest of whatever spirit is. And there are facile artists who throw off beauty like sparks without any touch of the Crowleyite wand. All sorts of combinations thrive. But what this says is work can do it. You can get to the magic by work.

I bought into the whole Romantic model of how a poet lives, and the younger part of me would be appalled by my expending my energies on doing something so frightfully banal as a lighting products catalog. Most of me doesn't feel this way at all--and still another part of me is puzzled why that is.

One of the things i've learned, though, is that you don't always run after inspiration: you also run after skills. Thomas wrote screenplays. voiceover narrations for propaganda films, and radio plays--and not all of them ere under milk wood. and by Lycett's account, he was excited about doing them, far beyond the money they'd bring. He was still more excited about the prospect of doing an opera with Igor Stravinsky. Some of that, I'm convinced, was the prospect of learning to do more.
Of course, not all skills are useful--but not all inspirations are either. The point, however, is that there is no hierarchy: a banal skill can be as important as a sublime inspiration. Nothing need be wasted, and nothing need be trivial.

Magic. O my brothers and sisters, is work, as well as work being magic. And art is work and art is magic.

None of it is simple, none of it is easy, and it will all burn you out.

But you sing in your chains like the sea.

Posted: Tuesday - January 01, 2008 at 06:29 PM        

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