The Violet Hour (23 page)

A friend remembers a last glance through the window when Thomas boarded the bus at the airport terminal on the final trip to America: Thomas was giving him a thumbs-down sign. By the time he settled into his seat on Pan Am flight 071, Thomas was panicking. Of course, many high-strung people panic on planes; if your life is at all fragile, airplane travel is one of those moments when you feel that fragility most acutely; any lack of structure, of solidity, any sense of the bottom falling out, makes itself felt as the plane rises into the air. But Thomas's panic on the plane was specifically about dying.

He was very precise about that last plane ride: “When I was waiting for the plane this time in London, I found I was drinking in a mad hurry…like a fool, good God, one after another whisky, and there was no hurry at all….I had all the time in the world to wait, but I was drinking as though there wasn't much time left for me….I felt as though something in me wanted to explode, it was just as though I were going to burst. I got on the plane and watched my watch, got drunk and stayed frightened all the way here…really only a little booze…mostly frightened and sick with the thought of death.”

At this point, the poet was in his late thirties. No one would deny that he was a little worse for the wear, but he was not suffering from a terminal illness; he was not, in any detectable way, dying. Caitlin said later, “When I last saw him before he went to New York, Dylan seemed tired, but no worse than that…he was always complaining about his health, gout, asthma, or other chest infections, but was a much stronger man than anyone ever suspected.” Why, then, is he frightened
and sick with the thought of death? When he said goodbye to his mother, Florence, he went back to the door three times to kiss her. Rollie McKenna, a photographer who took sad, haunted pictures of him in Wales and later in New York, said that before he left he made the tours of his friends in London and said goodbye as if for the last time. This may be the poetic license of hindsight on McKenna's part, but there is no doubt that on that plane ride to New York Thomas was more than usually afraid of death, and he was afraid of the thing in him that was drawn to death: “something in me wanted to explode.”

Once, in happier times, Thomas mimed a clownish suicide for the amusement of his guests. In July of 1951, after lunch, Thomas was sitting on the deck at home, in the boathouse in Laugharne, in the sun, overlooking the sparkling water. The dishes lay strewn across the table. John Malcolm Brinnin was practicing a formal speech he was preparing to give on the radio on the immortal poetry of Dylan Thomas. Afterward, Thomas pretended to hurl himself off the deck and said, “Randy-Dandy Curly-Girly Poet Leaps into Sea from Overdose of Praise.”

In the years before he died, Thomas rehearsed his death in jokes. On his second American tour, he wrote a postcard to a friend: “Caitlin and I are buried in the Tuzigoot stone on the other side of the card. We were killed in action, Manhattan island, spring, 1952, in a gallant battle against American Generosity. An American called Double Rye shot Caitlin to death. I was scalped by a Bourbon. Posthumous love to you.” There is
an eerie clairvoyance here, as he would, in a sense, be scalped by a Bourbon not long afterward, but it is a clairvoyance mingled with the power of humor, the willful, playful, temporary, in the end completely illusory control that language gives over life.

Thomas arrived at Idlewild Airport that last time, sober and unstrung. With his curly, unkempt hair, he looked like a little boy, puffy, awkward. He looked, as someone once observed, like an unmade bed. His current mistress, Liz Reitell, was there to collect him. From the outside, they made an unlikely couple. She was tall, striking, with dark wavy hair, dark-red lips, somehow evoking a movie star from an earlier era.

She was the latest in a string of mistresses, some casual and some not so casual. Women adored him. As the gimlet-eyed Hardwick observed, “So powerful and beguiling was his image—the image of a self-destroying, dying young poet of genius—that he aroused the most sacrificial longings in women. He had lost his looks, he was disorganized to a degree beyond belief, he had a wife and children in genuine need, and yet young ladies
felt
they had fallen in love with him. They fought over him; they nursed him while he retched and suffered and had delirium; they stayed up all night with him and yet went to their jobs the next morning. One girl bought cowboy suits for his children. Enormous mental, moral and physical adjustments were necessary to those who would be the
companions of this restless, frantic man. The girls were up to it—it was not a hardship, but a privilege.”

As the couple made their way through the airport, Thomas wanted to stop for a drink in the airport lounge, but there were workers picketing, and Liz refused to cross the line, so they took a taxi into the city. He was upset—possibly unduly upset—when they arrived at the Chelsea Hotel and he was not given his usual light room in the front, with a wrought-iron terrace; instead, he was given a smaller, darker, altogether lesser and dingier one in the back. This slight seems to have held some special meaning to him. The world was not treating him as it should; he was being cast aside.

The next morning he was feeling better, and they took a long walk to the West Village. At one point, he and Liz paused on the street to look at a movie poster of
Houdini
. Thomas said that maybe one day he would write a story about Houdini. Houdini the wily escape artist. He'd been interested in Houdini for a long time. Thomas was feeling good, feeling a little bit expansive, on that walk through the brownstone-lined cobblestone streets.

It was his birthday, and his birthday was troubling him. This was nothing new. His birthdays always troubled him, but this year his birthday was troubling him more. He was turning thirty-nine. Some friends had arranged a birthday party for him in their house in the Village, but he didn't eat anything or
talk to anyone. After half an hour he told his host he was feeling too sick to stay, and his host drove him and Liz back to the hotel. As usual, this sickness was something more than physical sickness. He sprawled across the bed and said to Liz, “What a filthy, undignified creature I am.”

Approaching another birthday two years earlier, he began to compose “Poem on His Birthday.” He described the poem this way: “He looks back at his times: his loves, his hates, all he has seen, and sees the logical process of death in every thing he has been and done. His death lurks for him, and for all, in the next lunatic war. And, still singing, still praising the radiant earth, still loving, though remotely, the animal creation also gladly pursuing their inevitable and grievous ends, he goes towards his. Why should he praise God and the beauty of the world, as he moves to horrible death?” One can only imagine what it was like to live in all the tangle of contradiction here: “
gladly
pursuing this inevitable and grievous end”? Why would a healthy man in his mid-thirties be brooding about death? Why was death lurking in everything he had been and done?

When Thomas was in his late twenties, the war had collided with his obsession with death; it brought the fear closer, gave it shape. Before he was rejected by the army, he was afraid—“my one-and-only body I will not give”—and afterward the bombs haunted him. He described walking to the BBC to talk about a job in the summer of 1940 and then stepping out into a raid. It astonished him that the city was carrying on as usual: “White-faced taxis still trembling through the streets, though, & buses going, & even people being shaved.” During another
raid, he hid under a table. “Are you frightened these nights?” he wrote to a friend. “When I wake up out of burning birdman dreams—they were frying aviators one night in a huge frying pan: it sounds whimsical now, it was appalling then—and hear the sound of bombs & gunfire only a little way away, I'm so relieved I could laugh or cry.”

In the days after his birthday, he was restless and miserable. He lay in his bed in the Chelsea Hotel, complaining. He wanted to go out and buy deli meat for dinner, so he and Liz went out and bought meat, and then when they got back to his room he wouldn't eat it. He distressed Liz by referring to Caitlin as his “widow.” With someone so prone to self-dramatization, was it hard to tell how much of this was theater? Could this have seemed simply a new iteration of his Catholic boy's guilt? Could he have wanted his mistress to see his betrayal of his wife in vivid terms so she would feel as bad as he did? Still, it was a powerful thing to say, calling his wife his widow. It was, if nothing else, the trying on of an idea.

It is too simple to say that Dylan Thomas either did or didn't drink himself into the coma. But there are other, smaller, more manageable questions that come to mind. How conscious was Thomas of his faltering health? Did he know that his drinking was wreaking a slow havoc on his body? Did he know that his liver was engorged and fatty? He clearly did not like doctors and avoided them. During these weeks he allowed a handsome and fashionable doctor Liz knew, Milton Feltenstein, to come and inject him with cortisone and consult on his gout and gastritis, but in general he didn't trust doctors.

On the cover of his last checkbook, he had scrawled a list of medications for his various ailments: “For nose, Fenox (Boots), chest, codeine soluble, Takazyma (P. Davies) acidity, calomel (liver).”

In 1946, he had been concerned enough about his health to admit himself to a hospital for “drinking obsessions.” He had told the doctors at St. Stephen's that he couldn't sleep without drinking. His drinking did not pass unnoticed in his family; before his father died, he often berated his son about it. D. J. Thomas, a schoolteacher, frustrated writer, great reader aloud of Shakespeare, also had a problem with drinking. Over the years, he had forced himself to slow down. Not to stop, but to slow down. He liked to tell his son that if he kept drinking at the rate he was drinking, he wouldn't live past forty.

By September of 1952, Thomas was having blackouts. He fell down a flight of stairs and got a black eye. He fainted in the cinema. He broke his ribs. He broke his arm. He fell asleep drunk and woke up only when a cigarette was burning his hand. He lost his straightforward, physical attachment to life in these moments, and that alarmed him. None of these events on their own signaled that he was dying, but they would have been signals of ill health, warnings perhaps, of the precariousness of his way of life, little flares and flashes of oblivion. In higher spirits, Thomas liked to joke about his many lives: “Life No. 13: promiscuity, booze, colored shirts, too much talk, too little work.” However, his doctor in Swansea, where he lived, warned him that if he didn't curb his drinking significantly, one of these episodes would be less than temporary. Is that the kind of
warning one truly takes on board? Maybe not. But on some level he must have heard it. Life No. 13 was taking its toll.

In response to a woman friend and patron, Princess Caetani, who wrote a concerned letter about his drinking in January of 1950, Thomas wrote the following: “Yes, I think I'm frightened of drink, too. But it is not so bad as perhaps, you think: the fear, I mean. It is only frightening when I am whirlingly perplexed, when my ordinary troubles are magnified into monsters and I fall weak down before them, when I do not know what to do or where to turn.” One imagines this letter may not have been as reassuring as he intended.