The Violet Hour (25 page)

Thomas's friend George Reavey ran into him at the White Horse Tavern in the middle of the afternoon. He was with Liz Reitell and a friend of hers, whom Reavey described as a “dopey drunken architect.” Reavey did not think much of Reitell or her friends. Thomas said he'd missed a lunch engagement. He was complaining of “a burnt-up feeling inside.” George asked him about Caitlin, and he said, “I don't know if I still have a wife.” The dopey architect had a copy of a book by the Scottish poet Norman Cameron, who had died in his forties, six months earlier. Reavey said, “Dylan became concerned about people dying so young. One had a feeling he was talking about himself. Reitell then took him off to some party.”

The next day George Reavey saw Thomas again at the White Horse Tavern, in the late afternoon. He looked sick. He was complaining that he had fallen on a rosebush the night before and scratched his eyeball. Reitell came and joined them. She
implied that the party had been a wild one and there was a lot of jumping off a table. Reavey wrote, “Christ, I thought. Why are they taking him to parties like that? The man can hardly stand on his two feet.”

He had a few beers with his friend the Scottish writer Ruthven Todd and a few other people at the Chelsea Hotel. He was very funny, riffing on a schizoid bar in which one was one's only customer. Then, because bars were closed for Election Day, Todd took him back to his house for more beers.

At the last minute, Thomas canceled plans to have steamed clams with Todd in an old saloon in Hoboken, saying he wasn't feeling well. He also canceled plans to go see a play called
Take a Giant Step
with a sculptor friend and went back to the hotel after a few cocktails. He slept fitfully through the evening, next to Liz, waking up several times, weeping about his smallest son, towheaded Colm: “Poor little bugger, he doesn't deserve this. Doesn't deserve my wanting to die.” Not “my dying.” My “wanting to die.”

At one point he woke and sat up in bed. He told Liz that he had to go out and have a drink. Liz tried to dissuade him. It was two in the morning. The doctor had told him to rest. He
dressed and went out. Liz stayed up in the dark hotel room waiting for him to come back. “Even the cockroaches have teeth,” Thomas had said of that room. He finally stumbled in and reported into the shadows: “I've had eighteen straight whiskeys. I think that's the record.”

When he woke up in the morning, he wanted air, so they went for a walk. They ended up in the dark woody interior of the White Horse Tavern for a couple of beers. He was supposed to go pick up a dinner jacket from one of his friends' houses, but Liz persuaded him to go back to the Chelsea instead. There he vomited and slept, and vomited and slept. Following the doctor's instructions, she gave him phenobarbital, but he couldn't keep the pill down. The doctor came and gave him a shot of morphine, which was then a fairly common treatment for excessive alcohol consumption, though it may not have been wise given the severity of the problems with his lungs.

“What did he say to you?” Thomas asked Liz afterward. “Did he say I was going to die?”

“No,” she said. “He simply said that you will have to accept the fact that you are very ill and you'll have to begin today to do something about it.”

That evening, Liz believed he suffered delirium tremens, hallucinating what he called “abstractions”—triangles, squares, and circles. Liz called a friend, a painter, to come over and help her watch him. Thomas said, “Hello, Jack, awful for you to have to do this,” but the painter shrugged this off. Thomas
continued, “What an undistinguished way to reach one's thirty-ninth year.”

A little after midnight, Thomas got worse. His breathing was ragged. His skin was blue. Liz called the doctor again. An ambulance came, and a stretcher bearing Thomas was carried down the stairs with its wrought-iron banister and through the lobby with its black-and-white floor tiles. They brought him to St. Vincent's Hospital on 13th Street and Seventh Avenue at a little after two in the morning. His medical records show that he had suffered “a severe insult to the brain.”

At five in the morning, Liz called Ruthven Todd, who hurried to the hospital from his house in the Village. By eight, John Brinnin arrived, having flown in from Boston, and friends, admirers, lovers, poets, publishers, gawkers, began to descend.

The precise origin of Thomas's coma has been the subject of fierce dispute. There is a certain murkiness in the medical records, which has fed the theories and speculations of those who did not accept the events of the evening as a natural outcome of his behavior. One of the doctors who examined him diagnosed him with “direct alcoholic toxicity in brain tissue.” But there are people who argue that Thomas didn't succumb to drink. There are people who argue that he was not, at any point in his life, an alcoholic. One critic would claim his “drinking was often more moderate, and more complex, than the legend would have us believe” and that he was not an alcoholic, because “of his periods of abstinence, displays of moderation and his preference for beer over wine and spirits.” This loyal
and imaginative collection of friends and critics would like to preserve the image of his vitality, of his robust celebration of God's earth; they are invested in his public defiance of death and want him to remain the booming, confident author of “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” and “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” In the service of this image, they prick and prod at the events of the November night in hopes of somehow clearing the poet's name. They seem to believe that if they could somehow prove that his coma was a pure accident or sheer medical malpractice, it would clear him of any responsibility or involvement in his own early death. In supporting their view, many of them have pored over his medical records. A doctor named William Murphy wrote a paper called “Creation and Destruction: Notes on Dylan Thomas,” in which he said, “It remains a mystery how so obviously and gravely ill a person, mentally and physically, could have remained outside a hospital.” And there are certainly reasonable questions about his treatment in the days leading up to his death. Why did Dr. Feltenstein allow him to walk around in such a wretched physical state, without ordering further tests or taking stronger steps to ensure the rest and abstention he was advocating?

The Death of Dylan Thomas
, a zealous and inventive account by Dr. James Nashold and George Tremlett, put forth the highly speculative theory that diabetes killed him and that he was, in fact, at the height of his creative powers when he died. (The evidence for this theory includes his mood swings, his depression, his blackouts, and his taste for candy; it dismisses urine tests that are negative for glucose.) There is in some of this ardent biographical speculation the ambience of a murder
scene: “Thomas' death was not as straightforward as the legend suggested. Why was everyone so quick at the time to blame alcohol? Why did they make no allowance for the body's ability to metabolize alcohol?…Why were no laboratory tests ordered when Thomas' problems first manifested themselves? Why was the truth concealed from his wife? Whose reputation was being protected by this cover-up? The doctors', the hospital's, Brinnin's or the mysterious mistresses'?” In the final pages of the book, the authors conclude that the poet “was struck down in his prime by a doctor who should have known better.” In this same line of interpretation, there are dark insinuations about why it took Liz Reitell so long to get him to the hospital after he was unconscious.

And yet these insinuations and theories seem curiously incidental to the death that was hovering over Thomas. Whether he had diabetes or an engorged liver, whether his system was weakened by alcohol or a complex combination of other conditions, including his pneumonia, he was still defying medical advice and common sense in pushing himself beyond reasonable limits. He knew he was sick, and he continued rather ardently and resourcefully to make himself sicker. If he had not died that week, surely he would have died sometime not long afterward. By the time he arrived in America, he had wished or worried himself into a physical state impossible to sustain. At some point, the poet's morbid and overblown fear of death transformed itself into barreling headlong toward it.