The greatest notoriety – and critical and sales success – enjoyed by the writer DM Thomas, who has died aged 88, came with his controversial novel The White Hotel (1981), inspired by his readings of Sigmund Freud and by Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Holocaust novel Babi Yar. Thomas’s novel combined these two influences in a driving, non-naturalistic plot centred on Lisa Erdman, a fictional patient of Freud’s, who progresses through sexual obsession to being shot down by Nazis in a ravine outside Kyiv.
The sex and violence were described in lingering, some said lubricious, detail. Although the novel was variously hailed – by Graham Greene and Time magazine, among others – as a powerful new departure in fiction, and an insight into the dark heart of the 20th century, it was attacked by some as pornographic and misogynistic.
In addition, Thomas was accused (a charge also levelled at his later novel Ararat) of plagiarising his factual material from Kuznetsov: he defended himself by counter-charging the authors whose works he had plundered of wanting to “copyright genocide”. At any rate, his pastiche of Freud’s epistolatory style was convincing enough to fool the great man’s daughter Anna, who demanded: “Where did he get those letters?”
A runaway bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, The White Hotel was pipped, to Thomas’s immense chagrin, to the 1981 Booker prize by Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.
The course of Thomas’s life and his work, in poetry and prose, was determined by his sometime tumultuous relations with women. A crisis brought on in the late 1970s by a domestic life divided between dual households, the deaths of his parents and the closure of the college in the American midwest where he was working, led him to undergo prolonged psychoanalysis and to produce his first fiction, The Flute Player (1979), written with the aim of winning a Gollancz fantasy award – which it duly did.
In 1980 he returned to his former university, Oxford, for postgraduate work arranged by his former tutor John Bayley. However, he preferred to use his freedom to write his own fiction, which, liberated by his analysis, spurted up from the wellsprings of his psyche in a seemingly unstoppable stream. He was not interested in the traditional formal structure of the novel, explaining that he was too impatient to get his characters from room to room, or continually intersperse “He said” or “She cried”. Instead of naturalism, he relied on streams of poetic prose, dream sequences and coincidences.
Thomas strove to repeat the success of The White Hotel with other novels dealing with genocide (Ararat, 1983) and Freud (Eating Pavlova, 1994); and key moments of 20th-century history including John F Kennedy’s assassination (Flying in to Love, 1992).
Always readable and often compelling, none of the later novels quite achieved the white-hot shock of The White Hotel. Bolstered financially by selling the film rights – though frustratingly for Thomas the movie was never made – he returned to his native Cornwall, settling in a large house in Truro. Long after it was written, a screenplay by Dennis Potter was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2018.
Born in Redruth, into a tight-knit, working-class community around the village of Carnkie, Donald was deeply attached to his Cornish roots, particularly his family, mythologising his close relationship with his parents, Amy (nee Moyle) and Harold Thomas.
He discovered sex as an adolescent during an abortive emigration to Australia with his parents after the second world war. It would remain an all-consuming obsession.
Precociously intelligent, after Redruth grammar school he followed in the footsteps of the Cornish historian AL Rowse in winning a scholarship to New College, Oxford, where he discovered literature via the teaching of Bayley and Lord David Cecil. Never orthodox in his literary tastes, he was told by a female don at his vivas : “I should read a little more about the medieval rhetoricians, Mr Thomas.” Gleefully he reported: “I never did.” Despite this deficiency, he secured a first, to his family’s intense pride.
He was already involved with a steady girlfriend, Maureen Skewes, who shared his Cornish childhood and in 1958, the year he graduated, became his first wife. But strict monogamy was not for Thomas, and his sexual explorations continued apace whenever opportunity offered.
National service at the height of the cold war was ameliorated by his selection for a course in Russian. Not a natural linguist, he passed out with sufficient knowledge of the language, his course assessment reported, to “conduct low-level interrogation”.
More importantly, he acquired a passionate enthusiasm for Russian life and literature, particularly for the poetry of Pushkin and Anna Akhmatova, both of whom he later translated, in versions whose technical limitations were more than made up for by his intuitive feel for the spirit of the poetry.
A respected poet in his own right, he produced eight books of verse before he turned to fiction, beginning with science-fiction in the influential magazine New Worlds, alongside Michael Moorcock and JG Ballard. His themes were sex, death, rebirth and the infinite world of the imagination.
Much influenced by the Cornish landscape, his poetry had a mystic, Celtic tinge. Physically, too, in his youth, he resembled his Welsh namesake, Dylan Thomas, with bulbous nose, wild curls and a cigarette moored to his lower lip, and some of his poems shared the mystically charged erotic preoccupations of the “Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive”. Thomas’s own favourite Celtic bard, however, was Yeats, whom he would read aloud or recite, the lines rolling evocatively out from his barrel-shaped body.
His reputation as a poet grew through the 60s and 70s as he taught at a succession of schools and then at a teacher training college in Hereford, where his children by Maureen, Caitlin and Sean (who followed him into fiction and journalism), grew up, and where he acquired a parallel family in Denise Aldred and their son Ross, juggling his time between the two households. Following his divorce from Maureen, in 1976 he married Denise.
Feeling imprisoned by this awkward situation, he escaped by guest lecturing at various American colleges, where his homesickness was ameliorated by affairs with some of his students.
Once established as a writer, he ran creative writing courses at the Arvon and Skyros centres in various locations, and at his own home. An inspired and inspiring teacher, he acquired the status of a literary guru among certain female admirers of The White Hotel. His belief that sex, art and literature were at the very centre of life was palpable to his fans. To others less enamoured, his self-absorption was repellent. Exploring the psychotherapy he underwent led to an autobiography, Memories and Hallucinations (1989).
In 1992, Thomas was set up by the ever-mischievous Julie Burchill, who got the then-aspiring writer Louise Doughty to report the results of a one-to-one erotic writing course with Thomas in the Modern Review, and his reputation as a lady-killer solidified into myth. There was no shortage of female applicants to join his courses, or his ever-changing harem of transient lovers. However, Denise’s death from cancer in 1998 hit Thomas hard, and he wrote movingly of her final illness.
Never lost for long, and unable to endure solitude, later that year he married Victoria Field, whom he had met on a Skyros course in Greece.
His biography Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life (1998) was warmly received, and went on to receive the Orwell prize. He continued to publish poetry – including a verse memoir, A Child of Love and War (2021) – and prose, and ran a group of Cornish writers called the Stray Dogs, after a famous early 20th-century Russian literary cafe in St Petersburg.
Thomas had huge vitality, a charismatic presence and considerable charm and humour. Into the often stifling and prissy world of English literature, he introduced a welcome raw honesty, an imaginative widening of limiting horizons, and a distinct whiff of sulphur.
His marriage to Victoria ended in divorce, and in 2005 he married Angela Embree. She and his three children survive him.
• Donald Michael Thomas, poet and novelist, born 27 January 1935; died 26 March 2023
