Artists in Dylan Thomas's Prose Works: Adam Naming and Aesop Fabling

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

I was once in a camp-mess in the British army where a group of
semi-intoxicated sergeants sat entranced before a television set
watching a decidedly intoxicated Dylan Thomas tell one of his stories.
Intoxicated partly by alcohol, no doubt, but primarily by words. I also
remember attending a performance of Under Milk Wood at Toronto’s Crest
Theatre in the late 1950s at which it took the audience at least half an
hour to realize that the play contained comedy as well as “culture.”

I could not help being reminded of both these incidents while reading
Mayer’s book, which I approached with high expectations. There is now
a considerable critical library devoted to Thomas, but most of it omits
or neglects his prose. A species of academic snobbery is evident here, a
reluctance to appreciate that side of Thomas’s work—Under Milk Wood,
“A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” etc.—that has proven most
popular. Mayer, I hoped, would help restore the

balance.

As a scholarly study, Artists in Dylan Thomas’s Prose Works dutifully
covers its limited topic. It is well researched, accurate, and thorough,
but, with the exception of a brief segment titled “The Lyrical
Impulse” in the final chapter devoted to Under Milk Wood, it lacks any
sense of verbal urgency. I was never convinced that Mayer enjoyed
Thomas’s stylistic pyrotechnics, that she had fully responded to his
“way with words.” The Under Milk Wood chapter is the most satisfying
for the simple reason that this “play for voices” demands
illustrative quotations that are so much more compelling than those from
Thomas’s earlier, more solemn, but less animated prose writings.

Those intoxicated sergeants responded to Thomas’s rhetorical genius
far more quickly and, I suspect, more deeply than the Toronto audience
so obviously receiving its dose of culture from an “artist.” Mayer,
I fear, is more aligned with the latter than with the former. Her
scholarship is sound, but I wish she had paid less attention to
Thomas’s rather conventional artist figures and more to his own
skilfully varied and exuberant art.