The University of Cusop Dingle Discusses Dylan Thomas

The group met in the little sitting room to the side of the bar at the Swan. It was small enough to be intimate, but the group was large enough for a lively and wide-ranging discussion after the talk. This was given by Patricia Daly, who has been a fan of Dylan Thomas for years. The title was "Dylan Thomas: Famous for all the wrong reasons".
This is the 100th anniversary of Dylan Thomas's birth, somewhat overshadowed by the commemorations of the Great War, and Pat was talking about "brochure-culture", the way the Welsh Tourist Board's brochures encouraging people to visit Laugharne, where he wrote a lot of his work, superficially encouraged the myth of the drunkard poet who died a tragically early death.
The real man behind the myth was far more interesting, as is often the case, and he didn't drink himself to death - he died of bronchial pneumonia made worse by the mis-diagnosis and treatment he got in New York. As Pat said, if he had been in Britain with the NHS, he would probably have survived, but the pressures of an American tour and the lack of health insurance or anyone around him prepared to pay for treatment up front meant that it was far too late when he finally was taken into hospital.
It was an excellent talk, including extracts from Dylan Thomas's work, and several people in the audience said it ought to be published. It led to a discussion about the way a myth obscures the real person behind it, bringing in DH Lawrence as another example, and also Lawrence of Arabia, whose myth was written by a journalist who was only in Palestine for ten days! The background knowledge of the audience was impressive - I never knew that DH Lawrence's German wife was related to Baron von Richthoven! Lewis Carroll is another author whose myth bears little relation to reality, with an emphasis on the photos he took of Alice Liddell overshadowing the rest of his long and interesting life.
Then there was a discussion about outsiders and creativity - how Dylan Thomas may have felt he had to play the part of the "no good boyo from the Valleys" when he went up to London, for instance. It was noted that he didn't seem to need to drink when he came back to Wales, and Wales was where he did the bulk of his work. DH Lawrence, similarly, came from a provincial background and married "above himself" as they used to say then. Caitlin, Dylan's wife, came from the milieu in London in which he found himself, so she had the contacts that he didn't initially (and a gold designer swimsuit that cost £17!)
Nature vs. Nurture was another topic of conversation - apparently Dylan Thomas's great uncle was a Welsh Bard. His Bardic name was Gwylym Morlais (after a local stream) and Dylan's middle name was Morlais. Dylan comes from a character in the Mabinogion, the great cycle of Welsh myths. It would be interesting to see if there were any similarities in style or subject matter between the Welsh bard and the English-speaking poet, but it's something that could only be done by a Welsh-speaking scholar. Dylan's father, too, was a poet, but trapped by the need to make a living for his family as a grammar school teacher in Swansea. He nurtured Dylan's talent from a very early age, and it was pretty certain that Dylan grew up thinking himself to be something special. He was also given elecution lessons to get rid of that undesirable Welsh accent.
We also talked about poetry more generally, and how poets need to make a living to support themselves - difficult in Dylan Thomas's day (he needed the patronage of the Bohemian set in London, starting when Edith Sitwell recognised his talent), and difficult today, when there doesn't seem to be a large audience for poetry. The modern education system came in for criticism here; apparently Dylan Thomas is not taught in schools because the poems are "too difficult".
"And Shakespeare is easy?" one chap asked from the back.

Having said that, there is a regular Poetry Pop-Up event at Tomatitos. The next one is on Wednesday 26th November, and is based around the work of Nick Drake.

The University of Cusop Dingle will be meeting again in the New Year, on January 8th, at 7.30pm at the Swan. This time there will be a small charge so that they can hire a room. One of the people who has agreed to contribute a talk is Tracy Thursfield, who thought she might talk about Yeats and the influence on his poetry of the Golden Dawn society.