Dylan Thomas

DYLAN THOMAS The code of night Bloomsbury Academic Collections: English Literary Criticism This carefully chosen selection of 56 classic works of literary criticism comes from the archives of Athlone Press, one of the most distinguished publishers of English criticism in the period 1950-2000. The volumes in the collection cover all periods and styles of literary criticism, from Beowulf to Pinter, and include works of literary theory as well as studies of specific periods, writers or works. Authors include Herbert Grierson, Barbara Hardy, Christopher Norris, George Kane, BMW Tillyard, Patricia Ball, Geoffrey Tillotson, David Holbrook, and John Sutherland. All titles are issued in cased bindings as complete facsimile editions; ebook versions are also available. Titles in English Literary Criticism are available in the following subsets: English Literary Criticism: General Theory and History English Literary Criticism: Pre-1700 English Literary Criticism: 18th-19th Centuries English Literary Criticism: 20th Century Other titles available in English Literary Criticism: Pre-1700 include: Aldous Huxley: A Study of the Major Novels, Peter Bowering Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence, David Holbrook The Existential and its Exits: Literary and Philosophical Perspectives on the Works of Beckett, lonesco, Genet and Pinter, L. A. C. Dobrez The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett, Katharine Worth The Filibuster: A Study of the Political ideas ofWyndham Lewis, D. G. Bridson The Literary Criticism ofT.S. Eliot: New Essays, David Newton-De Molina Theory and Personality: The Significance of T.S. Eliot's Criticism, Brian Lee T.S. Eliot: Mystic, Son and Lover, Donald J. Childs DYLAN THOMAS The Code of Night David Holbrook BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC COLLECTIONS: English Literary Criticism - 20th Century BLOOMSBURY LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Pic 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London NewYork WC1B3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Pic First published in 1972 This edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing pic © David Holbrook, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. David Holbrook has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. Bloomsbury Academic Collections ISSN 2051-0012 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 9781472508003 (Hardback) ISBN: 9781472514639 (ePDF) ISBN: 9781472536150 (Bloomsbury Academic Collections: English Literary Criticism - 20th Century) Entire Collection ISBN: 9781472535412 (Bloomsbury Academic Collections: English Literary Criticism) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Printed and bound in Great Britain For Harry Guntrip in gratitude for his immense work in claryfying object-relations theory and in promoting insights into the problem of being human ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Extracts from Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems 1934-1952 and Selected Letters (arranged by Con- stantine Fitzgibbon) are reprinted with the permission of the Dylan Thomas Estate and J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. Contents Introduction: The Genesis of Identity 1 1 Ethical Problems of the Schizoid Individual 25 2 Dylan the Sea Son 35 3 The Role of the Reader 58 4 The 'Living Cipher' of the Early Poems 73 5 The Code of Night 90 6 The Role of the Critic 97 7 Picking the Life Out 123 8 Windy Houdini 137 9 No Return 143 10 Many Sounding Minded 176 11 'Sharp in my Second Death' 183 12 An Inability to Mourn 191 13 The Other Air 199 14 Lament and the Death Circuit 212 15 Laughing Delightedly at Hate: Under Milk Wood 221 16 The Poet and the Point of Living 245 Bibliography 262 Index 267 Since the first womb spat forth a baby's corpse, The mother's cry has fumed about the wind; O tidal winds, cast up her cries for me; That I may drown, let loose her flood of tears . Dylan Thomas, The Woman Speaks (TheAdelphi, 1934, p. 399) 1 learnt the verbs of will, and had my secret; The code of night tapped on my tongue; What had been one was many sounding minded . Dylan Thomas, From love's first fever to her plague Introduction The Genesis of Identity Dylan Thomas's Vision and Prayer begins: Who Are you . and ends with a verse which focuses its shape on the word T: I Am found . The present work is an attempt to show that Dylan Thomas's poetry was an anguished attempt to ask and to answer the question, which is King Lear's question, 'Who is it that can tell me who I am?' He suffered a profound confusion of identity and what R. D. Laing has called 'ontological insecurity'. He was, in fact, a schizoid individual—one of those persons, suffering from a dreadful feeling of never having been born, psychically, into whose plight we are now gaining important new insights. These, I believe, will help us to understand Dylan Thomas's confused behaviour, his incoherence, his alcoholism, his impulse to project a public image, reactions to him ranging from religious adulation to angry rejection, his sexual behaviour, his maddening unreli- ability, his wit, his solemnity, his hate. But they also help us to understand his poetry. The critical question will remain, of course, as to how much his poetry has to offer as creative art. As will be seen, however, the 'schizoid diagnosis' enables us to approach this question from a different perspective. It does not absolve us from value judge- ments but it makes the essential question about a work of art this: 'Does the work convey to us something insightful of the nature of being human?' If we ask this, then I believe we shall conclude that Dylan Thomas did communicate some very fresh insights into 2 THE GENESIS OF IDENTITY strange aspects of human make-up and inward experience. But here we shall need to try to distinguish between his genuine insights, his more chaotic comments on life and certain other anti- human energies in his work. We are enabled to do so, I believe, by certain psychoanalytical explorations of some of the more uncanny aspects of the earliest stages in the formation of the human identity. The phrase 'schizoid diagnosis' is taken from the work of H. Guntrip, whose two fundamental works on psychoanalytical theory will be invoked in this book.1 Guntrip demonstrates how, in seeking the origins of mental disorders, psychoanalysis has penetrated deeper and deeper into the primary stages of the formation of the human personality. Since they have come to work increasingly with psychotic patients, psycho- therapists find themselves faced with having to help individuals to find answers to the question, 'What is it to be human?' Unless they can draw out answers in such patients, these can never become autonomous human beings. Here, we who have to do with poetry cannot but be interested, because the creative artist is driven by the same need—to question the very basis of one's being and existence. So, as I believe, and as I have argued in other works, the psychoanalyst and the literary critic are beginning to talk the same language in a new way, which helps us to understand poetry better. Happily, because of other works I have written on the subject, I can leave many of the questions which will immediately spring to the reader's mind, for discussion elsewhere. Here I feel free to take some ideas from recent psychoanalytical thought and see if they can help us to understand the poetry of Dylan Thomas as we have not done before. I will however insist that it is no part of my intention to 'explain away' Thomas's poetry in terms of the 'sublimation' of other, more 'real', impulses, or as the mere symptoms of a 'sickness'. As Viktor Frankl has pointed out, the capacity to question the nature and point of our existence is that which makes us man. To suffer from existential frustration and despair is not to be 'sick', but to be human. This attitude, found today in 'existential' psychoanalysis, completely reverses the attitude of classical Freudian 1 Personality Structure and Human Interaction (1961) and Schizoid Phenomena Object-relations, and the Self (1968). THE GENESIS OF IDENTITY 3 psychoanalysis, which tended, in a reductionist way, to reduce spiritual anxieties to problems of neurotic complexes or whatever, as though cathedrals were compensations for guilt, or symphonies were the cloaked expressions of sexual aggression. This reductive approach to culture has been one of the worst legacies of Freud's metapsychology and his attempt to base his theory on naturalistic biological science. Nor is it my intention to 'explain away' cultural activities in 'biological' terms of the expression of, for example, 'unsatisfied desires'. Here the work of the phenomenologists has emphasised that we must pay attention to the meaning, here and now, of symbols and signs in the consciousness of an individual, if we are to understand the way in which he creates himself and his world. It is to reduce the spiritual capacities of a human being to imply that these must be explained in terms of his biological functioning. This attitude accords, too, with the growing recognition in 'object-relations' psychoanalysis, that Freud 'never found a place for culture' and that now it is of the greatest importance to put culture at the centre of man's life, in our attitude to his nature.

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