Dylan Thomas
was here

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

This year Montreal celebrates the 50th anniversary of a famous visit to the city by a 37-year-old pudgy, rumpled, neurotic, impudent, threadbare, alcoholic, perpetually broke, deeply troubled, rude-limerick-telling, charming and flamboyant poet. Admittedly, Montrealers aren’t shooting off fireworks in honour of the half-century since Dylan Thomas came here on February 28, 1952, but I propose we light a wick or two.

When Thomas came he was everything that he was and yet none of it. Although established as one of the greatest all-time English language poets, much of his writing consisted of notes begging for cash. Although the creator of one of the great 20th-century literary oeuvres, Thomas was neurotic and self-doubting beyond limit. While shy and inward, the curly-haired drunk was also a strutting showman; sensitive and romantic, Thomas could also be a loudmouthed lout. The Welsh wordsmith came to Montreal cursed and blessed with an unparalleled lyrical gift and a fast-fraying psyche as fragile as a dollar store toy.

Thomas dropped out of high school at 16 and shot to fame the next year, thanks to a poem that starts: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees/ Is my destroyer. /And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose/My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.”

But the Dylan Thomas industry would only truly flourish after his death. During his three visits to North America, the chronically cash-challenged Thomas hoped to be offered some sort of university job. Schools proved reticent to take a chance on a part-time lunatic who’d drunkenly brag about writing one poem a year. The five stacks of Dylan Thomas books at McGill’s library remain a depressing shadow of the lost opportunity the school had to hire one of the great geniuses and characters of the age.

Anyone who turned up to see Thomas at McGill on that night would have heard a throwback romantic reading his work in the bizarre manner of a theatrical ghost, a thundering and semi-pompous style that helped launch poetry readings as a fashionable pastime.

After the reading, Thomas got drunk at the Shrine, aka Café André, on downtown Victoria Street (if bureaucrats truly want to change the name of that street, may I make an obvious suggestion?). The bar in the old McGill Student Union building was later demolished for an extension of the McCord Museum.

William Hartley, a young poet at the time, drank with Dylan Thomas that night. “He was completely, utterly out of his mind. He slurred a lot. He didn’t make much sense sometimes,” says Hartley. “But I found him a likeable man, very articulate.” During that night of alcoholic revelry, the drunken Welsh genius apparently appointed Hartley as his local successor, although Hartley soon ditched poetry for a day job at CFCF News.

Thomas gave in to “the dying of the light” 500 days after his trip to Montreal, succumbing to an alcoholic’s death in New York in November 1953. For him, the time had come for the scene he had described as: “Fathering and all humbling darkness/ Tells with silence the last light breaking/ And the still hour/ Is come of the sea tumbling in harness.”

But to believe the ridiculously talented and troubled character, death conquers all, except that “L” thing: “Though they go mad they shall be sane,/ Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;/ Though lovers be lost love shall not;/ And death shall have no dominion.”

>> To those inclined to a bit of drama this winter, the Thomas More Institute offers its ever-enjoyable bilingual theatre course starting September 25, in which gentle grown-ups attend a weekly play (a combination of 20 French and English plays). The group also meets from time to time to discuss it all. Once again, I co-host the discussion group along with the outstanding Ashley Murray and Robin Nish. Those interested can call 935-9585. :