Travel by DAR

Wales: A Few Belts with the Celts

(First published in Esquire)

Picture an overheated parlor where porridge-faced men consult their pocketwatches and hold forth with such whiners as "Well, the forestry service! It's a menace, isn't it?" Now picture a bone-cold churchyard at midnight, a lone woman bareback atop a lame white horse grazing at tombstones in the moonlight. What we have here, in rough terms, is the difference between mild old England and the troubled and tumbly nation of Wales.

The smallest country in that complex of affiliates called Great Britain, Wales makes up in mood and punch what she lacks in acreage. Darker, shorter, sturdier than the English, the Welsh are descended from the ancient race of Celts who remained unbowed when their Anglo-Saxon neighbors fell sway to the Romans. Bawdier, with better teeth (but then, who hasn't?), they populate a land where both melancholia and joy are rights worth fighting for, where folks like King Arthur and Richard Burton and Jan Morris have always done what they damn well pleased, where drizzle brings out the shine of a proud and downtrodden people.

All of which gives credence to the saying that if her various mountain ranges were ironed out, Wales would be the largest country in Great Britain. Try as the English might to look down their long noses at it as a land of little elves and faeries (their attitude towards these Celts is almost as condescending as toward those others, across the Irish Sea), the wild Welsh have a certain quality the dowdy English lack, namely "hwyl" (pronounced hooil): exuberance, volatility, passion. What Rod Stewart was referencing, no doubt, when he sang "You're Celtic, united ..." and Jagger meant when he called Welshmen "the real rockers."

But enough of comparisons. Wales has no need to be measured against anyone except perhaps itself in the form of Dylan Thomas, its most talented and turbulent son who, admittedly, went a bit over the top in the hwyl department. That this "Celtic micrometeorite," in Martin Amis's contemptuous phrase, is not strictly considered a Welsh poet (he composed in English, not usually daring the mother tongue that makes versifying trickier than acrostics), makes no difference. His presence colors all.

Go to church and it's right out of "Under Milkwood," complete with chiming bells and weathercocks and titanic- bosomed maiden aunts color-coordinated to a tee (their shoes the green of their feathered hats). Between hymns in the little underheated chapel, the preacher, mittening manfully on the pulpit like someone out of "Child's Christmas," has the devil's own time trying to mediate a business debate among worshippers who animate themselves into great spasms of Body Welsh over the question of which vacuum cleaner to buy ("Hoover" and "Hitachi" being the only non-Welsh sounds in the entire service).

Go north where blue-and-pink-dusted sheep poke their noses through the ruins of stone castles which loom, English- triumphant, through the ale-tasting mist. Go south where a quid will buy you cockles on the beach, in the company of bandaid-colored pigs rooting through honeysuckle hedges and vales of pebbledash. You can't escape it. The landscape, itself, presses Dylan Thomas cadences upon you.

Which makes it all the more shocking to come across his "Boathouse" in Laugharne and see that he had the most conventional taste of any 20th century poet. Not the domicile, per se, defiantly hugging the friable red sandstone cliff on one of the world's most treacherously beautiful shores (quicksand, cross currents, second highest tide after Newfoundland's). No, the interior decorating: the clock cozily on the mantle, the antimacassars on the pale green easy chairs. A visit here all too clearly betrays Dylan's dirty little secret: he was a closet bourgeois.

Indeed, his lower middle class boyhood home nearby helps explain why, cramped as it is with scraggly rose bush fighting for life in the cement sideyard. But his wife Caitlin going in for little Victorian lampshades, dusted daily by the maid? She of the aristocratic blood who, according to a descendant, was such an alcoholic pill she once decked her sister for standing between her and the bottle? 'Tis a mystery that can only be explained by drink.

Drink there was and continues to be. Though fewer in number than the 17 pubs of his day, many of those that remain in Laugharne feature prints of the famous Augustus Johns portrait of himself as a plastered patron saint, the rubbery roguish cheeks going to fat around the blubbery lips. Drinking under such a gaze, the acquired boast around town is to claim you peed where He peed, pissed out of your gourd, word-drunk, falling down a-rhyming. But nearly any outside wall will do for that. Fact is, nearly anyplace within stumbling distance is where DT might have had the dt's, but especially the pub in Brown's Hotel, his favorite hang, where old cronies are still eager to trade stories for drinks, or failing that, to sing Paul Anka songs for drinks, or failing that, to confess it's a stale industry they hate themselves for. (The squalor the first time around at least had the virtue of being original.) Let them buy: they'll talk your ear off about Meryl Streep and Jim Belushi recently scouting the town for background to play the sauce-crossed lovers.

Thus edified, you visit his final resting place. Down in the dip, where Topsider prints have trod a well-worn path, a brand new white wooden cross exhibits the bubbles of a recent paint job. The unthinkable: Do pilgrims regularly steal these markers to display them in frat rooms around the English-speaking world? Is that who he's patron saint of? As the cross gleams angelically in the dusk of 11 p.m. (last call), cows meander with lazy industry on the opposite bluff, and sheep baa out a sheep chain letter from hill to hill. It's tempting to think they're telegraphing his ironic fate: how in this tragic land there was a man who did not go easy into that good night, who denied himself the detested English moderation that might have kept him productive another few decades, and in so doing out-Welshed himself right into an early grave.