Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  Berryman returned in the morning and, by a strange quirk of fate, was the only person to see Dylan draw his last breath, shortly before 1 p.m. on Monday 9 November. Liz, who had been at his bedside, had taken a short break. Caitlin was still an in-patient at the Rivercrest clinic. When collected by Rose Slivka the next day, she was not aware that her husband had died.

  A post-mortem recorded the immediate cause of death as pneumonia – a common outcome with someone in a coma. This was linked to emphysema, which reflected Dylan’s history of smoking (and possibly also his taking of morphine). Though his heart was in poor shape (the flabbiness of his heart muscle and the calcification of his arteries would almost certainly have led to his death within ten years, according to Dr Charles MacKelvie), his liver, surprisingly, was healthier than expected, with little obvious sign of cirrhosis. However there had been pressure on his brain from the build-up of cerebro-spinal fluid. This was caused by the ‘chronic alcoholic poisoning’ of his system, which his leading neurosurgeon Dr William de Gutierrez-Mahoney had no doubt was the cause of Dylan’s death.

  The obituaries began to appear on 10 November. The New York Times drily summarised his poetic achievement, concluding that he ‘was the best of the younger poets who wrote in English, meaning the generation after T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden.’ On the other side of the Atlantic, The Times (of London) adopted an unusually personal tone, suggesting Dylan had ‘live(d) Christianity in a public way’, leaving a body of work which reflected this – ‘a poet narrow and severe with himself and wide and forgiving in his affections’. While acknowledging Dylan’s individuality, it positioned him firmly at the centre of English letters: ‘No one has ever worn more brilliantly the mask of anarchy to conceal the true face of tradition.’

  Although printed anonymously, this notice was written by Vernon Watkins who gave voice to the devastating loss felt not just by Dylan’s immediate friends but also by an extraordinary number of people who had come in contact with him, either personally or through his poetry. The literary critic, Alfred Kazin, who knew Dylan through his sister, Pearl, added his bit in his journal: ‘Dylan. How much light goes out with the passing of our wizard, our beautiful careless singer. With everything you can say against the automatism, even the lonely self-infatuation of this man, he embodied the deepest cry of poetry, he was our young singer! What lonely pride, I say, what unforgettable bounty of the word.’ Even Philip Larkin managed to extricate himself from the baleful influence of Kingsley Amis: ‘I can’t believe that D. T. is truly dead. It seems absurd. Three people who’ve altered the face of poetry, and the youngest has to die.’ (The others were Auden and Eliot.)

  Having been absent during much of Dylan’s time in the United States, James Laughlin sprang into action to organise a support fund for Caitlin and her children. With the help of a committee comprising W. H. Auden, e. e. cummings and other literary luminaries, he raised over $20,000 within two months. In Britain, T. S. Eliot, Louis MacNeice and Goronwy Rees put their names to a similar initiative (Rees even unsuccessfully lobbied Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill for a civil list pension for Caitlin), while the two leading newspapers in Swansea and Cardiff also raised money from their readers. ‘The death of poor old Dylan Thomas was one ghastly mess,’ Laughlin told another of his authors, the Roman Catholic poet and priest Thomas Merton. ‘Surely there was a miracle that anyone who was so helplessly messed up in his living could have turned out such beautiful poems. That was some kind of Grace all right for there could be no other explanation.’

  After returning from the Rivercrest, Caitlin stayed with the Slivkas. As a sculptor, David Slivka thought he might help raise money for the support fund by making Dylan’s death mask with a well-known colleague, Ibram Lassaw. Uncertain as to Caitlin’s reaction, he arranged for someone from the British embassy to obtain her permission on behalf of ‘two anonymous American artists’. He took a cast at the mortuary where Dylan had been laid to rest in a suit and tie that led Ruthven Todd to quip, ‘Dylan wouldn’t be seen dead in that.’ Later a surreal situation developed where Slivka worked on Dylan’s cast in his basement studio, while Caitlin received visitors upstairs, unaware what her host was doing.

  In the charged atmosphere of the moment, old rivalries soon surfaced. When George Reavey began peppering correspondents in Britain with a defamatory version of the events leading to Dylan’s death, Ruthven Todd responded with an alternative account. With Liz Reitell’s assistance, Todd tried to salvage from the Chelsea what he could of Dylan’s papers, including copies of Under Milk Wood. Anything in Dylan’s hand was already prized and marketable. Todd told of seeing Oscar Williams remove a Dylan manuscript from a book in his house. By affecting a clinch, he managed to retrieve it from Williams’s pocket.

  Mutual suspicions were temporarily forgotten when, on Friday 13 November, four hundred people crammed into St Luke’s episcopalian church in lower Manhattan to pay their respects at a memorial service. As the Pro Musica Antiqua choir sang motets by the Elizabethan composer Thomas Morley, only a solitary figure at the back bore witness to the troubled background to Dylan’s death. This was Liz Reitell, condemned to the unenviable position of the mistress – unable to mourn openly and feeling, as she put it, ‘the loneliest person in the world’.

  At Dylan’s interment in Laugharne eleven days later, Margaret Taylor found herself in a similar situation, though she viewed it more positively. ‘I know I must not show my grief,’ she wrote to the McAlpines in Tokyo, ‘first, because I have no right to any signs of sorrow which must be Caitlin’s exclusive right and, two, for Alan’s poor sake I must not seem to grieve – the result is therefore satisfactory in that I do think I have been able to help Caitlin by being cheerful and calm.’

  On the day of the funeral, Dylan lay in an open coffin in Pelican. When mourners were uncertain how to react to a body trussed in the American sepulchral style satirised by Evelyn Waugh in The Loved One, Florrie put them at their ease and encouraged them to look with the words, ‘But he’s nice.’ In lustrous late autumn weather, the coffin was carried up the main street to St Martin’s church by six local bearers. As it entered the lychgate a cock began to crow. Afterwards John Davenport heard what he thought was the perfect epitaph from Ebie Williams: ‘He was a very humble man.’ By common assent, the proceedings passed as Dylan would have liked, even if his widow did get drunk at the subsequent wake in Brown’s and tipped a tray of beer over Fred Janes.

  While Caitlin made little attempt to restrain her grief, others kept their wits about them. Having been at her side, physically supporting her, during the service, Dan Jones took the opportunity to talk to David Higham and Stuart Thomas about setting up a trust to care for Dylan’s family over the long term. The idea was that Dylan’s best friend, literary agent and solicitor would oversee his posthumous affairs, assuming responsibility for, loosely, his texts, copyrights and finances. Interest in Dylan’s work was, predictably, great, and important decisions needed taking about literary works, such as Under Milk Wood. The three men felt Caitlin was in no fit state to decide. They had no idea what they were letting themselves in for: legal problems relating to the Trust were to drag on for almost half a century.

  Determined to brook no delay, Dan and Stuart Thomas took Caitlin to the Carmarthen district probate office at the end of November to obtain letters of administration confirming her as her husband’s sole heir. (Dylan had died intestate, with assets worth £100.) Although, rationally, she understood the sense of this, she was not ready for it on an emotional level. The following day she went to London to stay with the Lockes. After an evening’s drinking, she made a botched suicide attempt, throwing herself from a third storey window. A shop front broke her fall and prevented her doing worse than breaking her collar-bone. However she seemed a danger to herself and, only three weeks after leaving the Rivercrest clinic, she agreed to sign into the Holloway Sanitorium, a mental hospital in Virginia Water, Surrey.

  Refusing to stay long, she returned to Wales where her
spirits were boosted by friends who came to visit – among them, Dan and Irene Jones who spent what Caitlin described as a ‘mocking madhouse Christmas’ in Laugharne. Dan was appalled at what he found. In her angry, self-lacerating widowhood Caitlin had become more violent and sexually rapacious than ever, and he wondered if she should not be compulsorily committed to an asylum. He compromised by hurriedly having her sign the trust deed. On 28 December Caitlin duly settled her inheritance, including all Dylan’s copyrights, in a trust, the income of which was to be divided 50:50 between herself on the one hand and her three children on the other.

  He and his co-trustees now had full authority to proceed. At the top of Dan’s agenda was the future of Under Milk Wood. The BBC was scheduled to give the play its first broadcast on 25 January 1954. Douglas Cleverdon had secured Richard Burton to take Dylan’s part of the First Voice (or narrator). Initially the wary BBC authorities wanted alterations to the text on grounds of decency. They were eventually satisfied with three cosmetic cuts. However Dan refused to allow Cleverdon to include changes that Dylan had made to the text in New York. Although Liz Reitell and Ruthven Todd vouched for these additions, Dan seemed to foresee complications if they were permitted.

  On the eve of the transmission, Burton and the cast performed an extract from the play at a gala for the Dylan Thomas memorial fund at the Globe Theatre, London. Louis MacNeice, who helped organise the event, read Canto XVIII from his Autumn Sequel, a tribute to his friends, in which Dylan featured as Gwilym. Although still in America, Edith Sitwell composed a ‘personal tribute’, while Burton also read Dylan’s poems. When asked what Dylan would have thought of the evening, which raised £1,169 5s., Caitlin said, ‘He would have liked the cheque.’

  The broadcast of the full version of Under Milk Wood the following night was well received, even if listeners in Wales were annoyed that the Third Programme’s coverage did not extend to parts of the principality, including Laugharne. When it was suggested that the Welsh Home Service might repeat the play, the local head of programmes refused, saying it was not ‘for family or home listening’. The affection with which Dylan portrayed his characters was ignored. As in the days of Caradoc Evans, the chapel influence balked at suggestions of Welsh hypocrisy and saw only malicious satire.

  Dan Jones continued preparing the text for publication by Dent in May. He stuck to his conviction that all American additions were of uncertain provenance and therefore superfluous, but undermined his literalist case by changing the town’s name from Llareggub to Llaregyb. The book was an immediate success, selling 13,000 copies in Britain in its first month, and over 53,000 in its first year. Its text became the jewel in a clutch of copyrights which by 1956–57 generated an income of £16,043 – not a huge amount, but better than the £500 or so a year that David Higham had forecast in the civil list application to Downing Street. At the same time Caedmon’s records were introducing Dylan and his poetry to a new audience, particularly in America. Before long Dylan was being studied in schools and universities. The returns to the estate grew accordingly, plateauing at around £90,000 a year in 1990 – a figure which had hardly changed in 2002.

  Nevertheless Caitlin was soon complaining to Higham that (in his words) ‘she didn’t feel happy about the Trustees and wanted to know whether she could change them!’ When told this was impossible, she struck out in different directions. Having avoided Liz Reitell in America, she wrote to her seeking ‘the truth’. Despite a conciliatory tone, she could not avoid berating her husband’s last lover, asking if Liz and Dylan had felt any guilt about betraying her. She inveighed against the countless women who had thrown themselves at him, adding self-indulgently that she was now quite ready to believe that his love for her had been nothing but a vast incomprehensible sham.

  Feeling restricted in a place with so many difficult and unresolved memories, Caitlin planned to take Colm to stay with Ruth Witt-Diamant in San Francisco, but that fell through. She still wanted to go to Elba, where she had hopes of reviving her 1947 holiday romance, but finances prevented it. Angry that she was expected to live on an income of £8 a week from the trustees, she threw herself into a series of indiscriminate sexual flings. By May Dan Jones reported: ‘A group of Laugharne men openly share Caitlin, and there are almost nightly orgies at the Boat House about which the police have been informed; at one of these all-night sharing out sessions the deaf-mute Booda was badly beaten up. All this takes place in the presence of whatever children happen to be there.’ Jones added that he had heard from Florrie and one of her female friends how Caitlin had made a sexual assault on Llewelyn, though he conceded that this might have been an attempt to shock the two old ladies rather than anything else.

  Recognising the attention-seeking aspect of Caitlin’s wayward behaviour, the normally garrulous Florrie turned a blind eye. She had decided that this was her best strategy if she were to play a role in bringing up her grandchildren (among whom she was particularly close to Aeronwy). She only vented her feelings to one or two people, such as Fred and Mary Janes, to whom she wrote, ‘[Caitlin] doesn’t seem to think of her kiddies … What a life she lives. What a shame. It’s the children I feel for and I feel mad. She is still Dylan’s widow, bless him, he is far better off dead than the husband of such a woman if one can call her that.’

  Caitlin was not placated when, over the summer, the trustees bought the lease of the Boat House from Margaret Taylor for a very reasonable £1,300. With a sense of desperation Stuart Thomas agreed to fund her trip to Elba in October. There she quickly tired of the innkeeper Giovanni Chiesa and launched into an affair with an eighteen year old miner. The locals amused themselves by shouting ‘prostituta, prostituta’ when she passed. On her return to London in April 1955, she claimed she was pregnant and soon had another abortion.

  By then she had begun writing a self-indulgent memoir, Leftover Life to Kill, which was largely about her reaction to Dylan’s death and its aftermath. Well before it was published in May 1957, it was preempted by Dylan Thomas in America, Brinnin’s revelatory account of his four year long relationship with her husband. Vernon Watkins was so incensed that Dent, Dylan’s British publishers, should be responsible for this unflattering portrait that he refused to allow them to put out Dylan’s letters to him. (As an unusual compromise, an edition appeared under the joint imprint of Dent and Faber.)

  With the benefit of hindsight, others still wanted to make sense of Dylan’s death. Alcohol had done the physical damage, of course; but why had he got himself into a state where, as Arthur Miller later remarked, Dylan could, with a week’s abstinence, have been ‘as healthy as a pig’? Taking his cue perhaps from Liz Reitell, who went to work for him and his wife, Marilyn Monroe, Miller observed in his 1987 autobiography Timebends that, having read Dylan’s ‘confessional’ on his father (presumably ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’), he felt that the Welshman had throttled himself for achieving fame while his father had died an unknown, failed man. ‘Thomas was making amends by murdering the gift he had stolen from the man he loved.’

  Dylan did take D.J.’s death worse than expected. But that was not the reason for his own demise. Others have pointed to his deepening concern that his poetry no longer had the spontaneity and verve of his youth. Again there is some truth in this: a laboured artificiality lies behind the mellifluousness of his ‘Prologue’, for example. But his last work, Under Milk Wood, was well-received even in his own lifetime. He was looking forward to working with Stravinsky and talked enthusiastically about future projects.

  A more realistic explanation lies in the dynamics of his doomed relationship with Caitlin. Most of his friends attest to his deep love of his wife whom he tended to idolise. In practical terms, however, their marriage had developed the worst aspects of what modern psychotherapists call co-dependency, with each of them covering for the alcoholic excesses of the other. This behaviour had taken its mental toll, sapping his creative energy. Dylan’s visits to the United States had introduced him to new possibilitie
s and new loves that had enabled him to see some way out of his impasse, even if it meant questioning the centrality of Caitlin in his life. Her recognition of this only fuelled her resentment at being left at home with the children, feeling unfulfilled and second-rate. However the strict rules of their partnership ensured that he could never free himself from her. He could not even acknowledge to himself that his love for her was in doubt. He only knew he could do nothing about it. So, as she ranted about his fecklessness and perfidy, he was left feeling angry and impotent.

  Ruthven Todd was given the first shot at writing an official biography but, befuddled by drink himself, he found the task beyond him. Determined not to become part of a myth-making machinery about his friend, he had difficulty picking his way through the recollections of people who insisted on writing themselves into Dylan’s story and giving it their own interpretations. If a single incident was witnessed by six people, he wrote, six different patterns of behaviour were reported. When he resigned from the job in 1962, the responsibility passed to another of Dylan’s old friends, Constantine FitzGibbon, who quickly polished off a life for publication in 1965. This remained the standard biography of Dylan until Paul Ferris’s more accomplished work in 1978.

  In time Caitlin began to forgive the husband she felt had betrayed and abandoned her. Signs of a healing process were evident in October 1955 when she applied for a licence to rebury Dylan in the grounds of his beloved Boat House. She was motivated partly by a dislike for St Martin’s church, which she felt had neglected his grave for stuffy moralistic reasons. Her petition reached the office of the Secretary of State for Wales who could see no objection. However, having made her point, Caitlin did not pursue her application.

  Caitlin continued to move desultorily between Britain and Italy until October 1957, when she met Giuseppe Fazio, a good-looking Sicilian with a talent for languages, who had found a niche in the Italian film business. Eleven years her junior, he had the patience and firmness to deal with her. She went to live with him in Catania where, in March 1963, at the advanced age of forty-nine, she bore him a son, Francesco.