“Do not go gentle into that good night.”
—DYLAN THOMAS
Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) is forever fixed in the popular imagination as a man on a barstool—or, more accurately, as a man falling off a barstool. “I’ll never forget being taken for the first time to the White Horse Tavern in the Village. Some of the regulars led me to the sacred table where the great Dylan Thomas had his last drink before he passed out and died at age thirty-nine,” journalist Dan Wakefield once reminisced. “I go, Wow! That’s fabulous; that’s what you were to aspire to.”
Nearly forty years before he met his ignominious end in New York City, Thomas was born in southern Wales to a well-read family. By age four, he could recite Shakespeare. As he recalled years later, “The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone. What the words stood for, symbolized, or meant was of very secondary importance.” At sixteen, Thomas left school early to work on the staff of the South Wales Daily Post as a critic.
In 1933, Thomas wrote an essay entitled “Genius and Madness Akin in the World of Art,” in which he declared that geniuses walk a line that is “difficult to differentiate, with any sureness, between insanity and eccentricity. The borderline of insanity is more difficult to trace than the majority of people, comparatively safe within the barriers of their own common-sensibility, can realize.” What he was saying, between the lines, was that it takes a madman to know a madman.
Like Arthur Rimbaud, Thomas began publishing as a teenager. His work was published in New English Weekly and The Listener, and, when he was twenty, in his first book of poetry, 18 Poems. He moved from Wales to London, where he surmised he had better chances of achieving literary fame. In spring 1936, Thomas met his future wife, Caitlin Macnamara, at a London pub.
Within hours of meeting each other, Caitlin was cradling Thomas’s head in her lap, listening to him drunkenly proclaim his love for her. They spent the next five days on a pub crawl, barely eating. Although they parted ways afterward, they met up again later that year and began living together. They married on July 11, 1937, and made their home in Wales.
According to Cyril Connolly, a critic who knew Thomas, “He was determined to drink as much as possible. He was obsessed with the idea that a poet should die young and live in such a way as to risk his own destruction.” This didn’t really shock Connolly at the time; despite Thomas’s devil-may-care attitude, this type of binge drinking was pretty typical of other college-age young people. And besides, despite his sporadic benders, Thomas kept to a regular daily schedule. He slept in the mornings, ate lunch (when he could afford it), wrote in the afternoons, and drank in the evenings.
Unfortunately, Thomas’s next two books, The Map of Love (poetry and short stories) and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (autobiographical essays), were commercial failures—in part because the publishing industry, especially in Europe, was in a terrible slump due to World War II.
Faced with the prospect of being drafted into Britain’s armed forces, the peacenik Thomas stayed out drinking the night before his conscription tribunal and showed up for his military hearing a physical wreck. Authorities were only too happy to give him a medical exemption from service (officially for “asthma”).
Thomas and Caitlin had two children and moved around frequently during wartime. They settled in a cottage in New Quay, Wales, in 1944. Life was, if not grand, at least stable ... until an ex-army neighbor shot up the Thomases’ cottage with a machine gun and threatened to blow the family up with a grenade. William Killick, a captain in the British army, had just returned from eighteen months of fighting in World War II and learned that his wife, Vera, had been giving part of his army pay to the pseudo-draft-dodging Thomas as an act of charity. (Thomas could be humble and charming when his ego didn’t get in the way, and his manner was prone to induce sympathy.) After a skirmish between Killick and Thomas at a local pub, the Thomases retreated to their cottage for the night. Then their wall exploded with gunfire, and Killick stormed into the living room and fired a machine gun into the ceiling. The crazed army captain, also holding a grenade, shouted, “You’re nothing but a lot of egoists!” at the Thomases—surely the oddest philosophical threat ever to escape the mouth of a man holding a machine gun in one hand and a grenade in the other. Killick didn’t pull the pin, and was arrested without casualties. After the Thomases moved, Killick was acquitted of attempted murder.
When Thomas’s next poetry collection, Deaths and Entrances, was published in 1946, critics finally hailed him as the genius he believed he had been all along.
Thomas began dedicating more and more time to his drinking. His parents moved into a house across from the Brown Hotel in Laugharne, where Thomas and his family were staying, so his mother could peer through the curtains to see if her son made it back to the hotel safely after a night of heavy drinking. Ever the gentleman, he would sometimes take off his shoes and tiptoe home so as not to wake the neighbors.
The Thomases had a third child while living in Laugharne, but Thomas was pulled away to the United States on a lecture tour beginning in February 1950. While the Old World had been a destination for American writers of the Lost Generation, World War II had devastated much of Europe—physically, financially, and morally. The United States had stepped, red-white-and-blue balls swinging, into the power vacuum. If a writer wanted his or her work to be read and have any impact in the new, postwar geopolitical climate, the United States was the only market that mattered.
Thomas traveled the American continent from coast to coast, lecturing, reading, and, of course, drinking. His tour manager, John Malcom Brinnin, had his hands full with Thomas. Brinnin acted alternately as an accountant, a guardian angel, a nursemaid, and a drinking buddy, depending upon the needs of his client. As essayist Elizabeth Hardwick recalled, “Would he arrive only to break down on the stage? Would some dismaying scene take place at the faculty party? Would he be offensive, violent, obscene? These were alarming and yet exciting possibilities.”
His wife, however, was distraught that such behavior was cheered. “Nobody ever needed encouragement less, and he was drowned in it,” she wrote in her memoir. Thomas “exhibited the excesses and experienced the adulation which would later be associated with rock stars.”
When Thomas finally made it to California, he announced at a dinner party that he had two goals: “To touch the titties of a beautiful blonde starlet and to meet Charlie Chaplin.” After actress Shelley Winters let him touch her breasts, he said, “I do not believe it’s necessary for me to meet Charlie Chaplin now.” Unfortunately, he did meet Chaplin, who complained of Thomas’s “rude, drunken behavior” while at Chaplin’s Hollywood estate. This consisted of showing up wasted with Winters and Marilyn Monroe and crashing his car into Chaplin’s tennis court. Next, he urinated in one of Chaplin’s potted plants. As Thomas once wrote, “When one burns one’s bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.”
He propositioned any and every woman he met, a tactic that occasionally met with success. Faculty at women’s colleges worked overtime as “honor guards” to keep the poet away from the student body following his wildly popular campus lectures. His wife was not pleased with his behavior. “They ought to know what he’s really like in America,” she wrote to Brinnin. “All those fool women who chase after him while I’m left here to rot with three screaming children and no money to pay the bills he leaves behind.” Truman Capote, who only observed Thomas from afar, described the poet as “an overgrown baby who’ll destroy every last thing he can get his hands on, including himself.”
Thomas went on several more tours of the United States. Caitlin even accompanied him once in an unsuccessful bid to keep him out of trouble. Writing about one of Thomas’s cross-country treks, a journalist from Time observed, “Thomas borrows with no thought of returning what is lent, seldom shows up on time, is a trial to his friends, and a worry to his family.” And, the reporter added, Thomas was rarely seen without a bottle of beer in hand.
When Scottish poet Ruthven Todd introduced Thomas to the White Horse saloon in New York City, “it was all over,” Brinnin wrote. The White Horse was an English-style pub that reminded Todd and Thomas of home. When Thomas drank there, people would crowd the bar to get a glimpse of the celebrated poet on his favorite bar stool. “That kid is going to kill himself,” one of his many mistresses said. “You can’t live the way he does and not pay for it.”
Thomas’s fourth visit to the United States would be his last. While in New York City in autumn 1953, Thomas complained of fatigue and spent much of his time in bed. He was having blackouts at frequent intervals, and doctors warned him to stop drinking. Even though he couldn’t hold his liquor down most days, he continued to drink with abandon. “I truly want to die,” he told another one of his mistresses. “I want to go to the Garden of Eden to die, to be forever unconscious.…”
Thomas spent most of the day in bed drinking on November 3, 1953. He was having trouble breathing, as were many; more than two hundred New Yorkers would die during November from air pollution. Thomas had been receiving cortisone injections for his fatigue, but his health was still an issue. He made it out of his hotel room to sign a contract for another U.S. lecture tour that, in spite of (or because of) his continued misbehavior and reputation, would have brought him $1,000 a week—in effect, financial freedom.
He went out for a drink at 2:00 a.m. that night to the White Horse Tavern and didn’t return to the Hotel Chelsea until 4:00 a.m. “I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that’s the record!” he proudly declared to his mistress. “I love you ... but I’m alone,” he told her before passing out.
When he finally woke up later that morning, Thomas returned to the White Horse for a beer. He was too sick to continue drinking, however, and returned to his hotel room, where a doctor gave him a cortisone shot. After Thomas’s condition failed to improve, the doctor returned and injected him with half a gram of morphine. At 2:30 a.m. the next morning, his mistress called an ambulance. He had fallen into a coma. While doctors believed his condition was the result of long-term alcohol abuse, it was undoubtedly complicated by numerous other contributing factors.
Thomas died five days later at St. Vincent’s Hospital. His only attendants were a nurse and John Berryman, an American poet with problems of his own.