Dylan Thomas: The Biography

This new edition of Paul Ferris's perceptive biography, which was originally published in 1977, is primarily notable for its frank portrait of the poet's marriage to Caitlin Macnamara Thomas, who died in 1994. "The essential truth about the Dylan-Caitlin relationship," Ferris writes, "was that his dependent nature left him vulnerable in later years when his wife withdrew her affection and became blatantly promiscuous." Yet the author is not unsympathetic to Caitlin, whose biography he wrote in 1993. The accounts of Thomas's raucous, drunken visits to America, where he died in 1953 at age 39, will certainly incline readers to forgive anything his wife did in revenge. The book's principal strengths remain what they were in 1977: a knowledgeable, in-depth account of the poet's childhood in Wales (Ferris himself was born a mile from Thomas's childhood home); a lucid disentangling of myth from fact in both interviews and contemporary sources; and a sensitive understanding that "behind the public cavortings was a private agony." This is Ferris's real subject, the agony of a boy who was "pretty ... spoiled ... the darling of the family," and who never managed to grow up enough to create a life that would support his poetic gifts. It's a sad story but a fascinating one. --Wendy Smith