Dylan’s fourth visit to New York started on the wrong foot. He had been expected six days before 20 October 1953 but, when Liz Reitell went to Idlewild airport to meet his plane on the earlier date, 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 By the time it caught up with him, it was out of date and had to be changed.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 women 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 Charlie 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.
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, ‘This 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 thinking 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.
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 collarbone. 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 possibilities 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 re-bury 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.
The birth of a child encouraged her to step up her battle with the Trust for more funds. In 1964 she received £5,500 as her half share of the trust’s post-tax income, as well as additional personal royalties from the successful Broadway play, Dylan, by Sidney Michaels, which was based partly on her book and partly on Brinnin’s. Even so, she wanted more money to fund a expensive lifestyle that ran to an apartment in Rome. In March 1966, with the help of the trustees, she sued for the return of the original manuscript of Under Milk Wood, which Douglas Cleverdon had sold claiming it to be his. It proved an expensive gamble when she lost and was forced to pay costs. Two months later she turned her fire on the trustees, suing them for withholding £9,000 due from the sale of five of Dylan’s letters to an American magazine. Wynford Vaughan-Thomas who had taken over as trustee from a disgruntled Dan Jones, remonstrated with Caitlin that over the previous decade she and her family had received ‘the best part of a quarter of a million pounds’ or ‘a yearly income greater than that paid to the Prime Minister’.
Stuart Thomas, the administrator of the trust, might have been more emollient. He did well out of the connection, charging generous expenses to the trust’s account. At one time he threatened to make a mockery of the set-up by arranging for his friend Kingsley Amis to become a trustee in place of Vaughan-Thomas who died in 1987. Amis could not abide Dylan either as a man or as a poet, though, occasionally, as when he opposed the ‘novelisation’ of Under Milk Wood, he brought his experience as a writer to the management of Dylan’s literary affairs. Stuart Thomas, to give him his due, played a difficult hand with some skill. Despite Caitlin’s furies, he performed his duty in keeping the trust not only intact but financially buoyant.
Gradually, around 1970, Caitlin began to conquer her alcoholism and lived the last two decades of her life sober and lucid, if still uncompromising. When, after several efforts, she reworked her memoirs, she pointed unsentimentally to alcohol as the bane of her life. (The book, which was both clear and moving, was published posthumously in 1997 as Double Drink Story.) Even as the demons began to disappear, she remained inconsistent to the last, making it known before she died in 1994 that, for all her devotion to her Italian family, she wanted to be buried beside her husband in the same Laugharne churchyard from which she had once wanted him moved.
Her passing did not make life any easier for the trust, for her son Francesco went to court, claiming that, as her heir, he was due her half-share in her husband’s estate. Caitlin had discussed this with her other children, but they were understandably unenthusiastic, or they might have allowed the trust to be broken. As it was, the estate withstood Francesco Fazio’s repeated legal assaults and his case was dismissed from the High Court in London in July 2002.
Strangely Dylan’s mother never benefited from the trust. Although helped by the actor Emlyn Williams who devised a successful one-man show about her son, she lived partially on national assistance until her death in the Boat House in August 1958. Of Dylan’s children, Llewelyn went to Harvard and enjoyed a successful career in advertising, before dropping out and seeking anonymity. Keeping matters in the family, he married Rhiannon, Stuart Thomas’s step-daughter, but later divorced. He died of cancer in 2000 in the Devon town of Dawlish where he liked to be known as Tom Llewelyn. His and Rhiannon’s Australian daughter Jemima was able to inherit his share in Dylan’s estate. Colm, like his brother, spent time in Australia, before settling in Italy. Aeronwy trained as a nurse before joining her mother in Italy. After marrying a Welshman, Trefor Ellis in 1973, she moved to New Malden, Surrey, where, as a member of her local church, she enjoys a suburban existence very different from her mother’s. With charm and tenacity, she acts as the public face of the Dylan Thomas family.
As for others in the story, Liz Reitell maintained a feisty dignity, even if, latterly, she tended to overemphasise the importance of her relationship with Dylan, calling it the ‘greatest love experience’ of her life. This was after she had married the architect Herb Hannum, whom she had introduced to Dylan, and worked in New York for Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. Then, abandoning the arts for the environment, her passion for wilderness took her to Montana where she married for a fourth time before dying in February 2001. Adopting a more conventional course, Pearl Kazin married the distinguished Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell in 1960, had a son, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she shows little sign of wanting to revisit her affair with Dylan. Her last known publication was an essay on her former Harvard tutor F. O. Mathiessen in The American Scholar.
Despite turbulence, Dylan’s literary reputation remains intact half a century after his death. Inevitably, the interest shown in his work in the wake of his dramatic demise was followed by a period of reassessment. In England he came under attack from a critical school influenced by the Movement poets and given intellectual fire-power by the Cambridge professor F. R. Leavis. Leading the charge was David Holbrook whose 1962 book Llareggub Revisited portrayed Dylan as infantile and his poetry largely meaningless. Meanwhile, at a time of national resurgence in Wales, Dylan, unlike his near name-sake R. S. Thomas, was dismissed for ignoring the true matter of his home country.
That did not prevent him taking his place in Poets’ Corner in London’s Westminster Abbey in 1982 nor having an expensive part-European Community funded Centre named after him in Swansea in 1995. As the epitome of the romantic poet, he remained popular, even if many of his audience knew little more than Under Milk Wood and a dozen of his poems. To the horror of a few die-hard nationalists, he became, with the inexorable logic of the MTV generation, a symbol of modern Welsh culture. When the European Union held a competition for an essay about Wales, Welsh-born Commissioner Neil Kinnock presented the only prize with the requisite community-wide appeal – a first edition of Under Milk Wood. Dylan would have loved both the irony and the recognition.