It is the Kaufman auditorium in New York. The lights go dim. A tiny, podgy figure, dressed in a rumpled suit, with tousled hair, walks out from the wings to a rostrum where he stands for a moment, gazing out on the waves of faces before him. Gripping the sides with both hands, he drinks from a glass of water, sweat pouring down his brow. Dylan Thomas is presenting Under Milk Wood for the first time. The date is 14th May 1953. Six months later he was dead.
Dylan Thomas was a major poet. His appeal was far wider and more popular than other great contemporary poets, such as Auden or Eliot. Thomas found - and kept - an audience that does not ordinarily read poetry, or buy books and quality papers. He became an icon and a plaque in his memory was placed in Westminster Abbey.
Dylan Thomas’s reputation as a person was destroyed by one book. John Malcolm Brinnin’s Dylan Thomas in American portrayed him as a drunken adulterer, liar and thief who had lost control of his talents. These allegations caused deep distress to his widow Caitlin and their closest friends. As other books were written, and he became familiar with these tensions, George Tremlett formed the belief that a web of misunderstood anecdotes lay at the heart of the Thomas myth.
Now Tremlett tells the whole story in this penetrating biography which traces the ways in which Dylan Thomas’s reputation became distorted, and then looks back over his life reassembling the evidence, introducing much new material, and documenting his sources to form a convincing new portrait.
