Three Neurotics

Dylan Thomas: A Biography By Paul Ferris Dial, 399 pp., $9.95 Tennessee Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham: 1940-1965 Edited and with Comments by Donald Windham Holt, 333 pp., $10 Allen Ginsberg Journals: Early Fifties Early Sixties Edited by Gordon Ball Grove, 302 pp., $10 What do Dylan Thomas, Tennessee Williams, and Allen Ginsberg have in common? All three were (are) poets in the broad sense of the word. All three were figures of the avant garde, expressing in their different ways revolt against the “Victorian” morality and “capitalist” class structure still quite firmly dominating the Establishment at the times of their comings-of-age. All three were sexual misfits, two of them very openly flaunting their homosexuality and using it as a symbolic key to the “alienation” that their works focused on to the exclusion of all other values. Other artists in other times (perhaps most other artists) have been as neurotically incapable of adjusting to family life and society, but never until now had neurosis itself been accepted consciously as the burden of the work of art. Never before had the artist assumed (or pretended to assume) that his hang-ups provided the key to artistic excellence or the good life.

Not that any of our three poets would put it that way, necessarily; or disguise the feelings of guilt over tormented lives that surface from time to time in their letters, journals, and poems. But only Ginsberg expressed any concern for the artist’s role as a socially responsible human being, or the function of art to transcend this imperfect world; and Ginsberg’s inability to make poetry out of anything except what he hates may account for his changeover from poet to guru.

SR

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Selden Rodman

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Dylan Thomas: A Biography By Paul Ferris Dial, 399 pp., $9.95 Tennessee Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham: 1940-1965 Edited and with Comments by Donald Windham Holt, 333 pp., $10 Allen Ginsberg Journals: Early Fifties Early Sixties Edited by Gordon Ball Grove, 302 pp., $10 What do Dylan Thomas, Tennessee Williams, and Allen Ginsberg have in common? All three were (are) poets in the broad sense of the word. All three were figures of the avant garde, expressing in their different ways revolt against the “Victorian” morality and “capitalist” class structure still quite firmly dominating the Establishment at the times of their comings-of-age. All three were sexual misfits, two of them very openly flaunting their homosexuality and using it as a symbolic key to the “alienation” that their works focused on to the exclusion of all other values. Other artists in other times (perhaps most other artists) have been as neurotically incapable of adjusting to family life and society, but never until now had neurosis itself been accepted consciously as the burden of the work of art. Never before had the artist assumed (or pretended to assume) that his hang-ups provided the key to artistic excellence or the good life.

Not that any of our three poets would put it that way, necessarily; or disguise the feelings of guilt over tormented lives that surface from time to time in their letters, journals, and poems. But only Ginsberg expressed any concern for the artist’s role as a socially responsible human being, or the function of art to transcend this imperfect world; and Ginsberg’s inability to make poetry out of anything except what he hates may account for his changeover from poet to guru.