According to a television programme due to be shown in Wales tomorrow, Dylan Thomas, the country's best known poet, was no more than an image obsessed caricature addicted to the "three Welsh Ss of singing, swinging and shagging".
Good soundbite, that. Unfortunately, it is inaccurate since Dylan Thomas could not sing, abhorred "swinging" (if you exclude drinking), and while drunkenly promiscuous, was, according to the uninhibited accounts of his late wife Caitlin, pretty damn useless between the sheets.
Still, these are challenging times, when people of talent and ability in almost any field, as long as they are dead, are being regularly shown up by television programmes as mediocrities, frauds, fools and knaves; so Dylan Thomas's time had to come sooner or later.
The BBC has had its Reputations series, and now HTV has its well-named Tin Gods documentary series. It is the latter in which Dylan Thomas gets his critical pasting, principally from Welsh academics such as Terence Hawkes, emeritus professor of literature at Cardiff University (who comes up with the "singing, swinging and shagging" sound bite), and other Welsh literary figures.
But it will surely be very difficult for these people (or for anyone) to sully the personal reputation of Dylan Thomas any further.
Everybody already knows that he borrowed money and never repaid it, that he peed on people's floors, that he fought with his wife non-stop, that she famously described him as a "shit", that he behaved boorishly and was a terrible drunk, who died aged 39 after a massive binge in New York in 1953. (Not everyone may know, however, that in his younger days in Swansea, Thomas was a modest drinker - "a half-pint man" in the words of a photographer who knew him.)
If any of this is recalled in the programme, it won't be new. Nor will we be surprised, in this kind of programme, to hear implications that because Thomas was so inadequate as a person, he was similarly inadequate as a writer.
This is the new journalism after all, with its emphasis on personal failings (which we can all empathise with) and its unashamed lack of insight into (or even belief in) talent, which it finds so difficult to accept, never mind understand. As for true genius, well of course that simply doesn't exist - and certainly not in a pudgy, boorish drunk.
We won't be too surprised either by the odd daub of political correctness, as when Prof Hawkes takes Dylan Thomas to task for being unable to "deal with" a Wales with a steel industry in decline, a mining industry in decline. Shame on the man - Thomas, that is.
Similarly, we must never forgive Oscar Wilde for not being able to deal in his work with the terrible poverty of London, or John Millington Synge for not properly confronting the shocking conditions under which Wicklow peasants or Connemara fishermen lived.
The boot goes in properly when another lecturer, Chris Wigginton of Trinity College in Carmarthen, notes that the main criticisms of Thomas's work are its adolescence, its excesses and its meaninglessness: "It depends on what you want from poetry, doesn't it? If you want poems on a Christmas card, you buy something from Hallmark."
Oh dear. Perhaps Hallmark made a terrible mistake in not commissioning Thomas. It's hard to know, however, how the greeting card company might have coped with some of his images - say for example the "flat, long girl" of The Followers who "looked, in the grey rain, as though she were crying from top to toe". Or the barmaid from the same tale, "with gold hair and two gold teeth in front, like a well-off rabbit's". Too adolescent, would you think? Too excessive?
As the man says, it depends on what you want from poetry - or prose for that matter. It's just that I can't imagine Hallmark or its customers feeling entirely happy reading, for example, about someone's "green age" being driven by the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. Who would you buy that card for - a hormonally-confused adolescent? Surely not for someone who wants a few saccharine lines with predictable rhymes. You might also send all three verses of Thomas's And Death Shall Have No Domin- ion to a grieving widow, but get a rather frosty reaction.
The Welsh themselves may not be greatly upset by the television programme on their best known writer, because their own feelings towards Dylan Thomas are ambivalent. Swansea has hardly forgiven him for leaving the town as soon as he could and making his name in London - and, as he once told a friend, "Swansea has more layers than an onion, and every one can reduce you to tears".
But if it's soundbites you want, there's one by Arthur Conan Doyle which seems appropriate, with regard to Dylan Thomas and his academic detractors: "Talent instantly recognises genius, but mediocrity never knows anything higher than itself."
Bglacken@irish-times.ie