Welcome to the dead drunk poets society

The spirit of Dylan Thomas lives on in a rest home for alcoholic poets in the house he lived in

Returning to the world of news and events after an absence of a week or so, I find that life has grown stranger than ever. A TV presenter of whom I have never heard has replaced Michael Barrymore as the tabloid hate figure of the moment. There are pictures of him apparently snorting cocaine on yesterday's front pages, followed by page after page of allegations of sexual behaviour so terrible as to relegate the events in Moscow to an inside-page, foreign news slot.

Elsewhere there is news of dead poets who, in the manner of their kind, have managed to spread discord and controversy from beyond the grave. Someone has discovered some rather lame Philip Larkin poems and is at war with the Society of Authors as to who should make money out of them. Two members of Ted Hughes's family seem about to go to war over his will. His daughter Frieda has apparently taken this financial blow particularly hard. "I walk into bookshops and see my father's astonishing works on the shelves, and have to acknowledge that I now feel they have been disconnected from me," she has written, rather peculiarly, in the introduction to her new collection, Waxworks.

The spirit of Dylan Thomas, meanwhile, is to live on in the form of a rest home for alcoholic poets that has been established in the house where he once lived. The new owners are to take in sozzled old versifiers who have "lost their way" and "encourage them back on the right path" with a course of rest, rehabilitation and – enough to send anyone back to the bottle, one would think – poetry readings.

More startling even than any of this was the face of Uncle Willie, my old friend Willie Donaldson, staring out from the cover of the review section of The Independent on Sunday, a glass of brandy in his hand, with, in the background, a blonde model perusing his latest work, Brewer's Rogues Villains and Eccentrics.

Weirdly, the perceptive profile of Uncle Willie by Robert Chalmers seems to offer a sort of response to the news of poets and TV presenters published elsewhere. On the face of it, his career as a moral miscreant would outstrip any coke-snorting, bimbo-bonking broadcaster; the poets, with their women and money problems, are simply not in his class.

So why do the shorthand headlines – "the grand old philanderer of British letters", "the former crack-smoking serial adulterer" – strike me as somehow missing the point about Willie Donaldson? After all, he has been through a crack phase in the 1990s and has happily described himself as a pervert for as long as I've known him. Indeed, his published accounts of the various depravities in which he somehow finds himself involved are the basis of some of the funniest and most original books to have been written in English over the past 30 years.

A corrupting influence, someone you can depend upon to be undependable, a decadent with an abiding curiosity about the darker byways of pleasure: that is the way in which Willie has presented himself in print down the years. Even among his friends, Willie plays the part. During the 1980s he used to tell me that, if he received two telephone calls one after another, the first from a hospital telling him that I was dangerously ill and was asking for him and the second from Francesca Annis (an actor whom he admired feverishly from afar at the time) calling him over to her place, he regretted that he would have no choice in the matter.

I almost believed him, but the books he has written, as is almost always the case, tell a more complex story. Beside the image of the dissolute on the skids, there is an alternative persona: a professional writer who has kept working through the most difficult times, a friend with his own form of loyalty and kindness, a moralist who in his best work – notably the astonishing novel, Is This Allowed? – has used his own odd, shambolic character and personal progress to cast a light on the times in which he lives to devastatingly funny and telling effect.

In her essay, Frieda Hughes quotes her father's words: "What's writing really about? It's about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life." The reality of Willie's life, in so far as one can extricate it from the versions that he has written, has had its share of emotional dysfunction – there's a good behaviour gene that he seems to have been born without – but something unusual and interesting has emerged from it.

At the launch party for his new guide to villainy, I did something unusual for an author. I bought three copies of the book – one for me and one for each of my two adult children, both of whom were there. It may not be the most morally uplifting volume, but it will certainly make them laugh. They also may just wonder about the odd, contradictory character of Uncle Willie.

terblacker@aol.com