Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  When Liz saw him the following evening, he was with the enigmatic Herb Hannum, a friend of hers. She had come to pick Dylan up before going to dinner with Ruthven and Jody Todd. A passing ‘ardent’, who had apparently asked Dylan to marry her, suggested they all join her for a meal in Sutton Place. But Dylan had had enough of her and, to her annoyance, insisted on keeping his prior engagement. Earlier he had been to see Velma Varner, who ran the children’s list at Viking. He was clearly pitching something to her, which appeared in a list of projects in a notebook around this time as ‘A Children’s Book, illustrated by self’ – a poignant indication of his future plans. With the help of Oscar Williams, he also managed to secure a further $500 from trusting Victor Weybright against delivery of the completed Adventures in the Skin Trade. The money was delivered to the Chelsea Hotel.

  In town next day, a Saturday, was a friend of Liz, Rassy Nance, with whom Dylan had stayed on a campus reading tour. Happy to see her again and flush with cash, he arranged to take her and Liz out to an expensive lunch at Luchow’s, a well-known German restaurant on 14th Street. He did not eat much, but it was an enjoyable reunion and the three of them agreed to meet again later in the evening, after Dylan had been to dinner with Harvey Breit of the New York Times. He did not show up. Instead he joined Dave Slivka and others in the White Horse where his movements were observed, probably not for the first time, by a detective hired by Time magazine to accumulate evidence in defence of its pending libel suit. The sleuth noted that Dylan downed glasses of lager, whisky and beer within minutes of arriving at the bar. Later Slivka took him to a restaurant in the hope that some food would counter the effects of the alcohol. Instead Dylan became morose, and started talking about his family. He moved on to the subject of sex, which he described in graphic detail, recalling the loss of his virginity, which he said had taken place in the back of a lorry in Swansea. He was still carousing at 2.30 in the morning, when the Time detective observed him ‘taking Benzedrine’.

  Dylan’s friends have denied using drugs, but when Reavey saw him at the White Horse the following afternoon (together with Liz and Hannum, which did not please him), he thought, without prompting, that his friend ‘looked a bit drugged’. When Reavey asked about Caitlin, Dylan, not for the first time, answered distractedly ‘that he wasn’t sure if he still had a wife’. Hannum had a book by Norman Cameron which caused Dylan to voice concern about people dying so young. Reavey could not escape the conclusion that ‘he was thinking about himself.’

  Earlier, complaining of ‘a real horror’ of a hangover, Dylan had telephoned Liz with a story about having thrown a girl out of a taxi on his way home the previous night. This was probably an invention to placate Liz after standing her up, because the private eye did not mention the incident – a symptom, perhaps, of Korsakoff’s syndrome, a psychosis that afflicts chronic alcoholics, causing them to compensate for sudden memory losses by inventing stories they believe are true.

  At an up-town party that Sunday evening, Dylan made a fool of himself by chasing a dancer round the room. According to Brinnin, he was so violent that the young girl suffered concussion. However, David Wagoner, who was present, said this was untrue: the girl, whom he did not know, was injured in a freak accident while demonstrating a dance with him. By midnight, when Dylan moved on for a nightcap at Howard Moss’s, he was very drunk. He managed to read some poems, finishing with Auden’s ‘September 1, 1939’. But his vision was blurred and his coordination poor. After making great play of seeing a non-existent mouse – which, in reality, always terrified him – he went out onto a balcony, stumbled into a rose bush and scratched an eyeball.

  He was back at the White Horse the following evening, ‘really looking sick and even more depressed’, according to Reavey, who could see that the scratched eyeball was real enough and who heard confirmation of the previous night’s excesses when Liz arrived and ‘said a few things that implied that the party had been rather a wild one and there had been a lot of jumping over a table. Christ, I thought, why are they taking him to parties like that? The man can hardly stand on his feet.’

  Dylan managed to rouse himself next day to sign a contract with Felix Gerstman, the lecture tour agent who had approached him some months earlier. After a short nap, he kept an appointment in the late afternoon to have cocktails with Santha Rama Rau and the theatrical producer Cheryl Crawford who was keen to put Adventures in the Skin Trade and perhaps Under Milk Wood onto the commercial stage. By the evening, he was exhausted and took to his bed where, with Liz at his side, he either slept fitfully or remonstrated tearfully about the misery of his existence and his wish to die. He was still restless, however. At around two o’clock in the morning he got up and said he needed a drink. He promised to be back in half an hour, but was gone for two hours or more. On his return, he is supposed to have burbled, ‘I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that is the record.’ This was impossible, as Ruthven Todd discovered when he checked with the barman and owner of the White Horse. Dylan had taken a taxi to his favourite pub, and stayed there until closing time at four. The consensus was that he cannot have drunk more than six measures of Old Grandad whisky. So far as Liz was concerned, any was too much.

  At this stage Dylan had been in New York for a fortnight and, so far as is known, had not been in touch with his family. Back in Britain, Caitlin was still seething towards him. That very day, she had contacted David Higham from the Lockes’ house in Hammersmith, thanking him for again sorting out her finances, which had been left in a worse state than usual. She laid into Dylan’s irresponsible behaviour and said she intended to have nothing more to do with him, except financially on behalf of her children. Not having heard from Dylan, she had just posted him a vitriolic letter, accusing him of being not only weak, drunken, unfaithful and deceitful, but mean and stingy as well. Threatening to kill herself or go on the streets, she announced she never wanted to go near him again. She told him he could consider himself ‘free as shit’. The letter was addressed to him care of John Brinnin in Cambridge, Massachusetts, so he never saw it. However when Edith Sitwell breezed into town a few days later, she was given a version of this story which, in her gossipy way, she quickly passed on to Kenneth Clark’s second wife Jane, whom she informed about the ‘wretched Caitlin’s appalling telegram, received by Dylan a week or ten days before he died. She telegraphed to him, “You have left me no alternative but suicide or the streets. Hate. Caitlin.” From that moment he never stopped drinking.’ Sitwell’s ‘telegram’ was almost certainly a precis of Caitlin’s letter, and the grande dame probably received her information in garbled fashion from her friend John Brinnin. However, it is conceivable that Dylan did receive a cable along these lines. Or, perhaps, he knew intuitively what it might say and felt guilty.

  On Wednesday 4 November Dylan had a date to catch a ferry across the Hudson to a well-known clam house in Hoboken, New Jersey. His companions were to be Hannum and Todd who recalled, ‘Dylan wanted to visit the men-only bar and crunch clam-shells under his feet on the sawdust-strewn floor.’ But when Todd telephoned the Chelsea in the morning, Dylan said he felt awful and, delighting in the Americanism, asked to take a rain-check. Somehow he roused himself to accompany Liz for a couple of beers at the White Horse. But he felt sick and had to go back to the hotel, where Liz insisted on calling Doctor Feltenstein. On the second of three visits that day, the physician gave Dylan another shot of ACTH and counselled an immediate course of medical treatment. Dylan, the trouper, was only concerned that this would mean his having to miss some up-coming reading engagements. When this time the cortisone failed to do its trick, Dylan collapsed and began to hallucinate. On a third call, Feltenstein prescribed a strong sedative, half a grain of morphine sulphate, which put Dylan to sleep. He also suggested that the increasingly distressed Liz might find someone else to help her share her bedside vigil. Todd and Slivka were out, so she asked an artist friend, Jack Heliker, to join her. Dylan was still alert enough to mumble when he arrived, ‘Thi
s is one hell of a way to greet a man, isn’t it?’

  He may have said a few more words: when Liz tried to reassure him that his horrors would abate, he answered, ‘Yes, I believe you.’ Around midnight, Liz saw his breath tighten and his face turn blue. Again she telephoned Feltenstein but he was not available. The hotel porter called the police who summoned an ambulance. Within minutes Dylan, in a deep coma, had been admitted to the emergency ward of St Vincent’s, a private Roman Catholic hospital on 11th Street at Seventh Avenue. The time was 1.58 a.m. on Thursday 5 November.

  Half an hour later a tearful Liz roused Brinnin in Massachusetts and told him the news. He caught the first available flight to New York and, by eight, had reached the hospital where Liz had been joined by Ruthven Todd. By then, Dylan’s doctors were clear that he was suffering from acute alcohol poisoning. The phrase ‘a severe insult to the brain’ was bandied about, though its origins are unclear. His coma was a bad sign, but his ability to maintain vital physical functions was more positive. The main worry was his difficulty in breathing, a result of having been given a substantial dose of morphine by Dr Feltenstein. After ascertaining that Dylan’s condition was precarious, but not completely hopeless, Liz, Brinnin and Todd began to call those close to him, both in New York and overseas.

  At this point the simmering rivalry between Dylan’s local friends flared into open hostility. On the one hand was a definite inner circle centred on these three and the Slivkas; on the other, a group, headed by George Reavey and Oscar Williams, who felt excluded. As well as being closer to Caitlin, they considered they had known Dylan longer and were the true guardians of his interests, literary and otherwise.

  Their war of words and deeds would have been hilarious, if not for the circumstances. Reavey claimed his first knowledge of Dylan in hospital came from reading the evening newspaper at around 7 p.m. (He later gloated that only one paper had seen fit to mention that Liz had been in Dylan’s room at one in the morning, and then it said she had been working with him on a manuscript.) However Todd recalled that Reavey and his wife Irene, as well as Oscar Williams, were at St Vincent’s by the late afternoon. Williams telephoned Ellen Stevenson in Chicago who had been supporting Dylan by buying his manuscripts and who now offered to pick up the bill for the best medical care in Manhattan. But since a treatment regime had already started at the hospital, this generous proposal was turned down, confirming Reavey in his unfounded suspicions that the other group had something to hide, and did not want independent specialists intruding.

  Brinnin and Robert MacGregor, New Directions’ representative on the scene since Laughlin was out of town, decided not to call Caitlin directly but to allow David Higham to convey the news. She was back in Laugharne where, later that evening, she was sitting in the school hall, listening with an appreciative audience to Dylan’s broadcast about the town, when she was passed a telegram which told her simply that Dylan had been ‘hospitalised’ in New York. She found this odd, not least because this was the first time she had seen this word. But she still felt so angry towards her husband, because of the dire financial situation he had left her in, that she put the matter to one side. On a certain level, she even felt some satisfaction that he was also suffering.

  Overnight Daniel Jones contacted Dr Charles MacKelvie, a Swansea doctor who was a friend of the Thomas family. He thought a professional voice would be useful in cabling Dylan’s clinical team at St Vincent’s with ‘possible valuable information about Dylan Thomas’. They put on record that eight weeks earlier he had had a ‘haematome’ or blood clot on his right temple, followed by a short blackout ‘without aura’, meaning without any symptoms of epilepsy, hysteria or related phenomena. They also noted his ‘alcohol addiction’. However his condition was potentially slightly improved after a tracheotomy allowed him to breathe more easily.

  Next morning, Caitlin was shaken out of her matrimonial bitterness by a telephone call from Oscar Williams, who plied her with gloomy prognostications, as well as insinuations that Dylan was being denied proper medical care. When she became hysterical, and demanded that Higham get her to New York as soon as possible, he prevaricated until Daniel Jones and Vernon Watkins agreed to guarantee her passage. For specific help she turned to the much maligned Margaret Taylor who arranged for the American embassy to open specially the following day (a Saturday) to give Caitlin a visa. Maggs also booked a transatlantic air passage with Thomas Cook for Sunday night, though an influential friend managed to bring this forward by twenty-four hours. With no idea how long she would be away, Caitlin, typically, did not stint on luggage. Shortly before her departure, she cabled Oscar Williams, giving him her flight details and asking him to ensure that Bob MacGregor was on hand at the airport with the equivalent of £43 to pay for her excess fare.

  The two camps sent competing representatives to meet the flight. On a cold slushy morning, David and Rose Slivka arrived at the airport with Bob MacGregor and a doctor from the hospital. Also waiting were Reavey and Williams, the latter of whom, according to Todd, sidled up to MacGregor and said, ‘We must hurry out a book of his papers.’ MacGregor did not mention this remark in his account to David Higham, but did say that Rose was Caitlin’s ‘best feminine friend in New York’. He also poured scorn on ‘the absurd lengths to which [Williams] went to be the official sympathiser’. At the airport Reavey claimed to have greeted Caitlin, but Slivka managed to pile her into the station wagon he had borrowed from Rollie McKenna. With a police escort, he then drove at top speed into Manhattan, followed by Reavey and Williams who at one stage managed to overtake.

  First stop was the hospital where an addled Caitlin greeted Todd: ‘Is the fucking man dead yet?’ When she first saw her husband trussed in an oxygen tent, breathing through his throat, she broke down. ‘This is not my Dylan,’ she cried. ‘I don’t want to be here.’ Reavey made much of the fact that her place at Dylan’s side was then taken by Liz.

  Caitlin was escorted to the Slivkas’ house to compose herself. However Reavey was convinced that she was being drawn into a conspiratorial web. His wife Irene who, Len Lye thought, had been egging him on managed to get through by telephone to Caitlin who, now unwinding and with a drink, wailed, ‘Where are you? Where is George? Where is Oscar? Why aren’t you over here?’ At the Slivkas’, Reavey claimed to find Caitlin under the impression that Dylan was dead. When he assured her this was not true, she ‘broke down and wept on my shoulder, which was better in the circumstances than just drinking rye and having light conversation with that riff-raff. Then after a time she took a bath – “I want to be like a bride”, she said, and prepared to return to the hospital.’

  In a stressful situation, both Slivka and Reavey were coping as best they could, but they were working at cross purposes: the one, perhaps adopting the escapist approach of an artist, trying to take Caitlin’s mind off the pain of her ordeal; the other hoping that her presence at Dylan’s bedside might yet lift him out of his coma. By the time Caitlin returned to the hospital, the balance of the equation had changed because she had been drinking heavily. She had taken pains to look her most striking, in a tight-fitting black wool dress, with her hair loosely tied up. But, ill-advisedly, she carried a bottle of whisky and was out of control. In a fit of anti-clerical rage, she tried to tear down a crucifix and pieces of religious iconography in Dylan’s ward. She swore profusely and had to be restrained when she man-handled Brinnin, whom she blamed for enticing Dylan back to the United States. When taken in to see Dylan by the matron, she tried to clamber onto her husband’s bed and kiss him. At this stage attendants were called; a staff doctor ordered her to be put in a strait jacket and committed to Bellevue, New York’s grim public mental hospital. The Brinnin–Todd party thought this an indignity too far and, calling on Doctor Feltenstein for professional contacts and financial help, arranged for Caitlin to go to the Rivercrest, a private psychiatric clinic on Long Island.

  As Liz Reitell resumed her vigil at Dylan’s bedside, two of his earlier girlfriends were thinki
ng about him in their different ways. Emily Holmes Coleman had converted to Catholicism and was living back in England. Having read about his coma in the newspapers, she had lain awake on the Saturday night and said a complete rosary for him. At communion on Sunday, the Dies Irae was sung because, significantly for Dylan, it was Remembrance Day. Although aware she had not seen him for years, she was cheered that she had read a recent statement in which he spoke of God. So she prayed, ‘God – because he had much sweetness in him and was a poet, a real one, I ask you to save him, now or at his death.’

  ‘What of Pearl?’ Helen McAlpine later asked George Reavey from Tokyo. ‘Did she appear at all? She was the only important one.’ That weekend Pearl was attending a literary conference at Bard College, a liberal arts establishment on the Hudson, ninety miles north of New York. Other participants included Saul Bellow, who taught there, Ralph Ellison and a near hysterical John Berryman, who was heard to declare that, if Dylan passed away, poetry would die with him. On a country walk, he intoned, between long gulps of air: ‘I’m breathing for Dylan, if I breathe for him perhaps he will remain alive.’ After driving back to New York on Sunday evening with Ellison and Pearl, Berryman insisted that, although it was almost midnight, they should go to St Vincent’s to see Dylan. Ellison declined because he felt the others’ grief was ‘so intensely private’. In recounting her last poignant moments with her former lover, Pearl eschewed all passion. She noted that a nun let them into the ward and, when they stood by the bed, Berryman looked very quiet and very miserable. She made no mention of her own feelings, though they seemed to incorporate both understanding and frustration from her later observation that Dylan had drunk himself to death because he knew he had written his best poetry: anything else would be a poor imitation.