Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  As he prepared for his departure over the next few days, he had his hair cut and acquired a new pair of trousers. Caitlin was worried about his blackouts, so when they ran into her doctor, Eric Hughes, on a visit to the cinema in Carmarthen, she asked his opinion. He suggested that they call at his house after the film, but Dylan managed to avoid this ad hoc medical consultation. When finally ready to leave for London with Caitlin at the weekend, it is said that, as if an intimation of his mortality, he turned back three times to kiss his mother goodbye.

  The Thomases stayed with the Lockes in Hammersmith. With Caitlin still angry that Dylan was going, they spent a turbulent last few days together. One evening Dylan on his own visited Philip Burton who wanted to hear about the progress of Under Milk Wood, but found his friend more exercised by the new play for voices he had envisaged as a vehicle for himself and Nancy Wickwire. Dylan’s idea about two people who grow up in a small Welsh town but never meet had been given a name, Two Streets. He was contemplating having his two characters converge at the end of the play; otherwise their only link was the mid-wife who delivered them both. ‘What a rich, Dylanesque character she would have been!’ noted Burton.

  Since Dylan talked of needing money for his children’s education, Burton suggested telephoning his ward, the actor Richard Burton. Still in his twenties, Richard had worked with Dylan on the 1946 BBC production of David Jones’s In Parenthesis. He used to tell how Dylan screamed the words ‘Mam, Mam’ so loud that all the professional actors looked up in amazement. Dylan simply said, ‘You try that with a cigarette in your mouth.’ Now Richard was prospering on the West End stage and Philip thought he might lend Dylan the required £200. When on the telephone there and then, Richard said he did not have the cash to hand, but might be able to obtain it, Dylan, showing his desperation, offered a sweetener – the rights to Two Streets, which he described down the line.

  When nothing materialised from that conversation, Dylan talked to Philip Burton about his opera for Stravinsky and read him some passages from Under Milk Wood. Burton pointed out, in the light of later claims about Dylan having a death wish, that the opera was about life triumphing over death – a favourite theme of the author. In addition, the whole tenor of Dylan’s talk was about developing new strands to his artistic repertoire that would take him through to old age.

  Dylan had arranged to deliver the manuscript of Under Milk Wood to Douglas Cleverdon on Monday 12 September, but although the BBC producer invited him and his agent David Higham to a celebratory meal at Simpson’s in the Strand, Dylan preferred to work on the final paragraphs at the Lockes’, and failed to turn up. Eventually on Thursday 15 October, four days before his departure, Dylan delivered a hand-written version to Cleverdon at the BBC. However he said he needed his copy back in two days’ time, as this was his only one, and he required it for his readings in New York. Cleverdon immediately put a secretary to typing the text, with a view to duplicating it. He duly returned Dylan’s copy, but the following day had a frantic call from the author, saying he had lost it in a pub or a taxi. Cleverdon told him not to worry as he would have another duplicated on Monday, the day of Dylan’s departure, and would deliver it to him before he left.

  On Monday a party comprising Caitlin, Harry and Cordelia Locke, and Margaret Taylor assembled to toast Dylan’s departure over lunch-time drinks. When they reached the air terminal on Cromwell Road in good time for him to catch the 5.45 bus for a 7.30 Pan American flight, the bar was closed. The group took on a dispirited air that descended into angry exchanges between Dylan and Caitlin. The mood lifted when they were joined by Cleverdon, with three immaculately roneo-ed copies of Under Milk Wood. Dylan was so grateful that he told the BBC producer to keep the original if it turned up. He mentioned three or four pubs where he might have lost it: without much fuss Cleverdon discovered it in one of them, the Helvetia in Old Compton Street.

  In the end Dylan could stand the recriminations no longer. Although the bus did not go for half an hour, Dylan saw it standing empty and asked Locke to accompany him to it. Having climbed to the upper deck, he told his friend to return to the others, adding, ‘I want to look out.’ Eventually the driver came and the bus prepared to depart. Locke’s last sight was of Dylan, as cheekily ambivalent and difficult to read as ever, shaking his head and turning his thumbs down.

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE GATES OF HELL

  Dylan’s fourth visit to New York started on the wrong foot. He had been expected six days earlier, on 14 October 1953, but when Liz Reitell went to Idlewild airport on that morning, his name was not on the passenger list. It transpired that Brinnin’s ticket had not reached Laugharne until after Dylan left home for London. By the time it caught up with him, it was out of date and had to be changed. This messed up his booking at the Chelsea Hotel where he was upset to be told he could not have his usual quarters, fronting on 23rd Street, but had, for the time being at least, to take a small room at the back.

  He had wanted a drink as soon as he stepped off the plane, but Liz had pointed out that airport workers were on strike and this would mean crossing a picket line. He reluctantly agreed to forgo his pick-me-up ‘but only for you and the Rights of Man’. On the journey into Manhattan he gave her his usual rigmarole about the rigours of his flight. But his main beef was about the ‘terrible week’ he had just experienced. He said he had missed her terribly and immediately wanted to go to bed with her. When they surfaced, he showed the sort of attentiveness Liz had hoped for. He had no inclination to visit his usual drinking haunts. In fact he did not want to see anyone, but was happy to play the role of sightseer and lover, and to wander round the city with Liz, before taking an early meal at the Jai Wai restaurant where he was content with a simple clam dish. Later he and Liz went to the Poetry Center for a rehearsal of the latest version of Under Milk Wood, the first performance of which was only four days away. He spent some time deciphering and correcting errors in the BBC typist’s transcription. After Brinnin called to welcome him, Dylan felt relaxed enough to drop in at the White Horse for a late-night drink. It may have been on this occasion that he met his young poet friend, David Wagoner, greeting him with a toast, ‘The Sons of Roethke never eat when they can drink’. (Wagoner had studied under Roethke.) Also present was Oscar Williams about whom Dylan said, when he went to the lavatory, ‘I can’t fart without having Oscar come running up with a roll of toilet paper.’

  When Dylan offered Liz some orange juice in bed next morning, she had a brief sense that the Gods of romance were on her side. In her later notes, she quoted Dylan as saying, ‘You’re neither my nurse nor my manager; you’re my love.’ But he was constitutionally unable to maintain this sort of attentiveness to a woman. On his second day in New York, he seemed much more nervous: when he and Liz walked down to her apartment on Charles Street, he saw a billboard advertising the new Tony Curtis film Houdini which somehow disturbed his equilibrium. Only a few weeks earlier he had written to Marguerite Caetani comparing his own condition to that of the great escapologist. When Liz invited him into her place, he declined. Later he said he did not feel well and retired to bed for the afternoon. Liz decided to give him half a gram of phenobarbitone and leave him for the night. The following day, after another rehearsal, Dylan joined her and a friend for a meal at Herdt’s where he ate pork chops. (She later described this as his ‘last real meal’.) On the Friday she had to work, which seems to have annoyed him. He took it as a licence to get roaringly drunk with a literary critic, Bill Troy, and some representatives of a movie distributor, Cinema 16, which had been trying to contact him since July about participating in a symposium on film and poetry. On Liz’s return, she had to dismiss these visitors from Dylan’s room. When Troy warned her against romantic involvement because it would lead to hurt, she put him in his place with her comment that she had ‘been there and back’.

  But by then the alcoholic damage she had been trying to guard against had been inflicted. Dylan was in bad shape when he and Liz went to the �
�Y’ for another rehearsal. Liz had to take his place in the reading, as he moped and shivered under blankets. He told Herb Hannum, an architect friend of Liz, that he was no longer capable of things he had done as a young man, adding he had ‘seen the gates of hell’ and was ‘frightened’. More positively, he talked of changing his ways, informing Liz specifically that he ‘really want[ed] to go on’.

  After staying the night with him, Liz slipped out early next morning to go to her apartment for a change of clothes. When she returned, Dylan had left a note, asking her to meet him at the Chelsea Chop House for breakfast. He was talking to Hannum and still looking very sick. With a performance of Under Milk Wood due in the evening, Hannum suggested he should consult Dr Feltenstein. After initial resistance, Dylan soon found himself in the surgery of the physician with the ‘winking needle’. Feltenstein gave him a shot of Adrenocorticotrophic hormone (ACTH), a steroid regarded as a pharmaceutical panacea of the moment. Its dual role was to reduce the inflammation of Dylan’s gout and provide a stress-relieving adrenaline boost. As a further energiser, Feltenstein also gave Dylan a prescription of Benzedrine, or amphetamine.

  As they emerged and walked along Third Avenue, Dylan told Liz about the ‘feeling of dread’ like a band of pressure inside his head. But soon the medication kicked in, and he perked up physically, even if, at another rehearsal, he alarmed Brinnin with his ashen looks and, in particular, the dullness of his sunken eyes. After this latest run-through, he and Liz went to Rollie McKenna’s nearby flat to relax and on to a dark, old-fashioned restaurant, where he was almost his old self. He asked Liz about her life, though when she responded, and started telling him about how bored she was working at the ‘Y’ and how she wanted to paint, he switched off. Nevertheless she enjoyed herself: ‘we were both peaceful with each other.’ The production went well and, at a later party at McKenna’s, Dylan talked animatedly and appeared not to drink. When a guest asked why, he replied, ‘It’s just that I have seen the gates of hell, that’s all.’

  The following day, a Sunday, a matinée of the play was scheduled. Dylan started brightly, as the Chelsea Hotel management had finally managed to change his room. ‘Then we’ll be all right,’ he told Liz, as if where he slept had some magical power. Around noon, they both visited Brinnin in his hotel for a discussion about finance. Brinnin was taken aback by Dylan’s distant, grasping attitude, which seemed to take no notice of the close relationship he thought they had developed. He later learnt from McKenna that both Dylan and Liz believed he had been ignoring the Welshman. There was an element of truth: the abstemious Brinnin still felt distaste for some of the places Dylan frequented in the Village, but he trusted his friend was being well looked after by Liz.

  The afternoon show of Under Milk Wood was, by all accounts, the best yet. Even Dylan admitted this was the one he had been waiting for. Afterwards he was invited to a party in Sutton Place given by one of his ‘ardents’. Dylan was attracted to this woman which did not please Liz, though she agreed to accompany him there. With this added sexual tension, Dylan fell apart. He gulped down tumblers of Irish whiskey, before becoming boisterous and disappearing upstairs with his hostess. He broke off from this activity when Brinnin appeared and the two of them, with Liz also, had a tearful reconciliation in which they agreed that, though there had been periods of mutual misunderstanding, these were unimportant. The clouds seemed to lift again, as Dylan clasped Brinnin and said, ‘John, you know, don’t you? This is for ever.’ But then, extraordinarily, Dylan turned away and seemed to forget everything he had said. He resumed his dalliance with his hostess, before lapsing into total drunkenness on the floor. When an upset Liz and Brinnin moved to leave on their own, Dylan got up and followed them sheepishly, announcing, ‘Here I am.’

  On the journey back to the Village by taxi, he asked Liz to accompany him to the White Horse, but she refused. When she stopped the cab at her apartment, Dylan announced in his most stentorian tones, ‘I used to have a friend who lived near here.’ Liz told him simply, ‘You still do.’ He carried on to the White Horse where one of the regulars set him up with a girl whom he brought back to the Chelsea for the night.

  Next day Liz had had enough and resolved to tell Dylan she was not prepared to carry on with their relationship. An opportunity arose when he called her at the ‘Y’ in the afternoon and said he wanted to see her ‘terribly’. When she joined him at the Algonquin, he had been drinking heavily. He was engaged in a conversation with a Dutchman about war. This was no ordinary exchange of views, however. Dylan started raving about the horrors of combat, falsely implying that he had been involved in active service himself. After a waiter tried to quieten him, Dylan became even more hysterical about blood, mutilation, burning and death. Only when Liz took his hand, did he stop, break down and cry.

  In the street outside, he started up again, swearing and making faces at passers-by, and tottering in an unfortunate parody of a drunk. When he noticed that a double bill comprising a Western and a Mickey Spillane thriller was playing at a 42nd Street cinema, he wanted to see it. Emerging much calmer and more sober, he took Liz to Goody’s, a Village bar she liked. However when she started speculating if someone was homosexual, saying it was difficult to tell, he became agitated. He said he thought he was going mad and he was concerned that it might be because he was homosexual himself, and always had been. On his way back from a cigarette machine, he noticed a young couple kissing and spat out, ‘How filthy’. When she remarked he sounded like a Puritan, he replied, ‘I am a Puritan,’ as if discovering something about himself for the first time. He later declared that perhaps the ‘right doctor’ might be able to help him. When Liz told Brinnin about this incident, she said Dylan could not even utter the word ‘psychiatrist’ and added, ‘I couldn’t help thinking this nice specialist he had in mind was his own father – the dying man he wanted to confess to and get absolution from.’ She described his condition as ‘homosexual panic’, which, as a woman of the world, she had found in half the men she had known. When Brinnin wondered if Dylan’s incessant lunging after women had anything to do with this, she reassured him: ‘If it’s his performance in bed you’re worried about, don’t. You have my word for it.’

  On 27 October, the following day, Dylan was thirty-nine, and so was his friend Dave Slivka, who had been born in Illinois on exactly the same day. Slivka and his wife Rose held a party in their Washington Street house to celebrate this double anniversary. They prepared an excellent spread, Liz bought a bottle of bourbon, and Jody Todd, from around the corner, made a banner reading ‘Dylan and David’, with two angels to hold it up. But after half an hour Dylan ground to a halt. He stopped talking, said he was sick, and had to be driven back to the Chelsea, where he threw himself on his bed and made a gloomy speech about being a ‘filthy, undignified creature’. When Liz begged him to do something about it, he took offence and shouted at her not to ‘go on about it’. He started talking about Caitlin and the guilt he felt towards her. ‘She’s crying too,’ he said, though it was not clear if this was a statement of fact, comfort or condemnation. Liz’s efforts to leave only brought the response, ‘That won’t help my agony.’

  Dylan had become an embarrassment. His tough-minded lyricism had helped refresh American poetry, suggesting a way out of its post-war aridity, while his charismatic voice had introduced new audiences to the possibilities of both the written and the spoken word. Yet now he was a snivelling wreck – a not unprecedented fate among poets (Chatterton and Rimbaud were earlier examples), but Dylan’s troubles seemed self-inflicted. When Brinnin put in a late telephone call to wish him a happy birthday, he was not certain that Dylan even realised who he was.

  As often, when performances were required, Dylan rallied next day when he took part in Cinema 16’s discussion at City College on film and poetry with Arthur Miller, Maya Deren and others. He played the ingenue, drawing laughs by deflating the pretensions of his fellow panelists. True to form, he averred that the most ‘poetic’ films were by Charli
e Chaplin and the Marx Brothers. Later, a crowd from the symposium repaired to the White Horse where Liz idly sketched. Dylan took pleasure in her rough drawings and handed them round the room. A sceptical observer of this convivial scene was George Reavey who had been worried about Dylan’s pallor on the platform at City College. Like others who knew Dylan, he had heard alarming stories. He did not like Liz and her circle, regarding them as bad influences. So he restricted himself to ‘a word or two’ with Dylan who readily accepted his invitation to call at his house on West 15th Street, but seemed ‘somehow very very sad and sick looking’. When Dylan failed to make contact, Reavey became worried and called his hotel. He later claimed his messages were not delivered, and access was generally barred by Liz. In the light of subsequent developments, such recollections need treating with caution. But they are indicative of the concern, as well as the growing division and competitiveness, among Dylan’s New York friends.

  The next few days passed in a blur, as Dylan went through the motions at various social engagements. Having promised Liz he would drink nothing but beer, he had lunch with Georgia Williams on 29 October. He spent the afternoon with her in Sutton Place, instead of cutting his Under Milk Wood text for Mademoiselle, whose managing editor Cyrilly Abels had invited him for dinner that evening. Nevertheless Dylan negotiated this more formal occasion with aplomb, swapping ghost stories with the writer Santha Rama Rau, the sophisticated Wellesley-educated daughter of a former Indian ambassador to the United States.