Among my DVD’s: A Poet in New York

 

The story of Dylan Thomas’ life provokes as much discussion as his poetical works. Subject of much myth-making, and many a biography by those who knew him, and others who claimed to know him but did not, his oft-times stormy character certainly left its mark on the poetry-world of the mid twentieth century. But for me his story is also a cautionary tale, granting insight to the near impossibility of making a dignified living by the arts, and worse, that sometimes to be blessed by a prodigious talent can also be a curse, one that more or less guarantees a premature and ignominious end after an all too brief a life of tortured insecurity.

Director Andrew Davies here picks up the story in the last year of the poet’s life, with Thomas, played by Tom Hollander, having been invited to New York by fellow poet, critic and admirer, John Brinnin, played by Ewen Bremner. He’d been to New York before, but seemed to have earned little from it, and was tempted back on this occasion with promises of a more lucrative collaboration with the composer Stravinsky.

Background biographical details are penciled in for us by flashback, though slanted overly towards a bucolic penury in rural Camarthenshire, centred around the famous boathouse at Laugharne. That Thomas also had a property in London, where he lived and worked extensively, especially during the war years, is blurred out in order to focus on this final, fateful, and largely self destructive episode, contrasting the beauty of this part of Wales, with the boozy squalor of New York .

His many biographies reveal a complex and, at times, disagreeable character, prone to drink and philandering, a man who could treat those around him appallingly. Yet he was also capable of great kindness and possessed of a certain sweetness, exuding an air of vulnerability and helplessness that the women he encountered found irresistible. It seemed he had only to be away from home for a moment to pick up another lover.

For all of his philandering though, the one true and somewhat stormy love of his life, was his wife, Caitlin, a woman possessed of a wild and fiery temperament, here plaid by Essie Davies. Sadly, they were not well matched, and in their later years she became for Thomas a woman he could neither live with nor without.

So, it’s November 1953 and he arrives in New York, a chain-smoking alcoholic, vulnerable, and burnt out. He sweats and vomits though readings of his work, suffers blackouts during rehearsals. He attends parties, celebrations, presses the hands of New York’s literati, regales them with his bonhomie, woos his audiences with dramatic readings of his work, but underneath he’s a man adrift, stricken by the recent death of his father, and unable to return home to his chaotic marriage. We have the impression he’s taking refuge, deliberately courting death, and indeed not so slowly killing himself with drink.

By turns dramatic, deeply moving but also funny, I felt the film did a fine job of presenting us with as dignified a portrait as possible of such a complex and difficult man, a man who’s flaws seemed very much on the surface of his being. I’m sure there’s nothing here that would disappoint even the most critical Dylan Thomas admirer.