Paul Ferris
Prolific author whose life of Dylan Thomas was acclaimed for sorting fact from self-created legend
PAUL FERRIS, who has died aged 89, was a journalist, biographer and television scriptwriter who was best known as the author of the definitive biography of the poet Dylan Thomas (1977, revised 1999), and the only biography of his wife Caitlin.
Ferris had a feel for the Welshness of Thomas’s work, which he found to have “the rich dark melancholy and the flamboyant imagery that go with the Celtic character”. He described how Thomas’s poetry was influenced by the alliteration and internal rhyme within each line that is a classic device in Welsh-language verse. He also understood Thomas’s spirituality, noting the images and cadences of the King James Bible which ran through his work.
Ferris’s understanding for the poet probably owed much to the fact that, like Thomas, he was born and brought up in Swansea and followed a similar route from suburb to grammar school to local paper.
Paul Frederick Ferris was born in the Sketty suburb of Swansea on February 15 1929, 15 years after Thomas, and a mile from his house. As he wrote in the introduction to his biography: “The fence of the newly built lunatic asylum that ‘leers down the valley like a fool’ in one of his notebook poems was at the end of the garden, its hooked nails pointing both ways, and I would wake, terrified, at the voices of madmen in my dreams. I was twelve before I heard of Dylan Thomas, when I read ‘The peaches’ in a wartime paperback.”
It was his English master at Swansea Grammar School for boys, Mount Pleasant, Thomas’s alma mater, who introduced him to his works at a time when Thomas was a little known literary figure who had yet to write Under Milk Wood: “But in the Grammar School we soon became Thomas fans and imagined some lingering presence in the place.” During his National Service as an RAF pay clerk, Ferris would sit on his bed “writing dreadful Dylan Thomas pastiche poems”.
Ferris, like Thomas, began his career as a cub reporter on the Swansea Evening Post and, some time around 1949, with a couple of colleagues, he met the poet in the saloon bar of Swansea’s bombed-out Metropole Hotel. Thomas was standing at the counter, “surrounded by people trying to buy him drinks”.
They were eventually introduced, Ferris recalled. “Dylan looked at me with those great fishy eyes,” said “something about our being the editor’s blue-eyed boys”, then turned back to his drink. “He was never safe from his admirers”, Ferris noted in his biography, “or they from him.”
Thomas died aged 39 in 1953, and the same year Ferris left Swansea for London, where he got a job as letters’ editor on Woman’s Own. Later he worked briefly for the Observer, then went freelance, becoming the paper’s radio critic. For some years in the 1950s he had written radio talks and features, work which led to him to write his first book, the novel, A Changed Man (1958), which won comparisons with Kingsley Amis, with its hero “full of lust and discontent”.
He sent a copy to Amis and received a letter from him a few weeks later: “Dear Paul, For some reason I didn’t get around to A Changed Man until the other day, but now I feel I must write to say how sodding funny and good I thought it was. A book to re-read, too. Bonzer, sport. Many congratulations. Yours, Kingsley.”
Ferris went on to write several more novels, some of which had their origin in true stories. Infidelity (1999) was based on a gruesome murder in a Welsh holiday resort in 1920, and Cora Crane (2003) was inspired by the true life of Cora Stewart, an English woman who became the lover of Stephen Crane, the American war correspondent and author who wrote The Red Badge of Courage.
His first work of non-fiction, The City (1960), was an account of London’s financial district. His first biography, in 1971, was of the newspaper tycoon Lord Northcliffe, but it was his biography of Dylan Thomas, first published in 1977, which established his reputation.
The Sunday Telegraph reviewer quoted Thomas’s remark that “the lie is imaginatively exciting, while the truth is flat and tedious”. And Kingsley Amis, reviewing the book in The Observer, praised Ferris for the scrupulous fairness with which he had sorted out the facts from the “self-created legend” of Thomas “the roaring boyo”. He called Ferris’s book “brilliant” and “a hilarious, shocking, sad story”.
In writing the biography Ferris came up against Thomas’s widow, Caitlin, who was famously litigious, and as a result the book pulled its punches about her infidelities. In his revised version, published after Caitlin’s death, he reported how the poet’s wife had once remarked to him that, given her behaviour, it was pure good luck that Thomas was the father of her children.
In 1985 Ferris edited and published The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas, a book one reviewer described as “the most moving” he had read in years, “like an infinitely wonderful and terrible novel”. Then, towards the end of her life, Ferris embarked on his biography of Thomas’s wife, Caitlin (1993), with which she agreed to cooperate for £8,000. He found her living in Sicily with her second husband, full of resentment but still in thrall to Thomas’s legend, the income from his estate, and her belief in her own unrecognised genius.
Described by one reviewer as a “cruel, witty” work, Ferris’s biography described a “beautiful, menacing, man-eating woman”, who regarded herself as an artist, writer and dancer, yet whose essential talent was “to find the worm at the core of every apple”.
The book gave details of her abortions, slatternly housekeeping, her multiple infidelities and her boozing during her marriage to Thomas, noting that her sexual appetite was such that she could derive erotic pleasure merely from dancing to gramophone music, pretending to be Isadora Duncan. But it noted that Thomas never ceased to love her or to need her and attributed at least some of his self-destructive streak to her behaviour towards him.
A harrowing passage describing Thomas’s death scene in a New York hospital had Caitlin reaching the death bed just in time to attempt to wreck his oxygen tent; try to strangle his American sponsor John Malcolm Brinnin; smash a crucifix; and attack a nun. She was put in a straitjacket. The coffin bearers at Thomas’s funeral in Laugharne included one of her lovers.
Ferris’s other books included a biography of Richard Burton (1981), whom he presented as a man who remained in his soul a working class Welsh miner; Sir Huge: The Life of Sir Huw Wheldon (1990); Sex and the British (1993), a wide-ranging survey of British attitudes to scandal and sexual behaviour; a biography of Sigmund Freud (1997) which explored how the psychoanalyst’s personal life shaped his scientific theories; and Gower in History (2009) a romantic historical account of the Welsh peninsula. He also wrote a series of biopics of great Welsh figures for BBC television, including one of Dylan Thomas.
Paul Ferris is survived by his wife Mary and by their son and daughter.
Paul Ferris, born February 15 1929 died November 16 2018