The Violet Hour (24 page)

In the last few weeks of October he was feeling sick, and, more than sick, he was irrationally afraid of this sickness. He broke down one night and told Liz he didn't know if he could go on. Dr. Feltenstein urged him to rest. But he continued to push himself. He had a bronchial infection, which may have been blossoming into a full-scale pneumonia. He was vomiting blood during a rehearsal for the stage adaptation of
Under Milk Wood;
he had written it as a radio play about the inner life of the inhabitants of a Welsh fishing village called Llareggub, which was “bugger all” spelled backward. As he put it, the play was “gay & sad and sentimental and a bit barmy.”

John Brinnin offers this unpromising and slightly overwrought description of Thomas's appearance at that rehearsal: “He was liver-white, his lips loose and twisted, his eyes dulled, gelid,
and sunk into his head.” That same night, Liz Reitell tried to get him to stay in his room at the Chelsea Hotel. “I didn't want to ‘reform' Dylan,” she would explain. “I wanted to save his life.” Whatever her other virtues, however, she was not the most effective nurse. He invited people to his small room for whiskey and beers. He sat in bed and drank with them, still pushing himself.

Thomas had always had a very idiosyncratic relation to the idea of health. He harbored many romantic mythologies about the frailty of his constitution, and one of them centered on the idea that he had consumption. Even when he was a sturdy young man, his sense of theater demanded that he have a poet's constitution, and for some reason he had always held Keats as a point of reference. As a child, he had told his mother he would be better than Keats, and friends remember him proudly showing a bit of blood in his handkerchief, saying, “See, consumption!” One of his friends observed that when he coughed he was like a child drawing attention to his sickness. In fact, Thomas had terrible lungs, but there is no evidence that he ever had tuberculosis. Still, the romantic allure of the disease exerted some influence. Did he want to be sick; did he like the idea of sickness because it answered some need in him? He certainly liked the theater of sickness, the staginess, the attention it brought him, and later the excuses it provided.

Thomas would often invent sicknesses or exaggerate them; it was sometimes a sport to him and sometimes a necessity. He often used sickness and injury as an excuse, to editors, to friends, to patrons. “I have gout, strained back, bronchitis, fits,
and a sense of disaster, otherwise very ill,” he wrote once, in one of his customary litanies. The complaints slipped and blurred together, because they were not necessarily literal descriptions of his physical state. He was often doing things like not showing up to be best man at a friend's wedding, or not sending in a poem he promised to a magazine, or not showing up at a dinner at which he was being honored. And his abject and ornate and ultimately heartfelt apologies were often filled with colorful and desperate illnesses and ailments. He wrote, for instance, to one of his patrons: “I have been ill for several weeks, in and out of sickbeds in several, and increasingly depressing, furnished London rooms and spiritual orphanages. I caught lots of chills, and they jaundiced me, and I lay snarling at the edge of pleurisy, and I couldn't write or read and I didn't want to think.” In general, when he rhapsodized in this way about his health, he seemed to mean something bigger and broader than a single, pinpoint-able physical illness. When he told editors that he was sick with bronchitis and therefore was late on his radio play, or that his whole family had measles and he couldn't finish editing a story, there was an emotional truth to these lies and embellishments: It felt to him that the world was treating him unfairly, that things were too hard for him, and the way he wrote that feeling of desperation into life was to say that he was sick. The sickness was a shorthand, then, a way of talking about his very real sense of constant crisis; it gave a name to the difficulty. Of course, being drunk, and hungover, and generally unhealthy, the physical reality of a slightly broken-down body, with a double chin, a thickened middle, a racking cough, which was not improved by cigarettes, fed into this perception of himself as injured, compromised, and, later,
nearly dying. He liked to lie in bed after a particularly long and punishing night out and have Caitlin come and feed him little cubes of bread soaked in milk. This was what his mother used to do, and this was what he liked. The poet found illness a convenient language for his skewed relation to normal life, for his inability at times to function, for his radical abdication of responsibilities. Illness offered, for decades, a comfortable way for him to think about himself. Ever the poet, he pretty much set up camp and lived in the metaphor of being sick.

A private investigator hired by
Time
magazine was following Thomas in the weeks leading up to his death. In what seemed to those around him a doomed and desperate measure, he had begun the process of suing the magazine for libel for saying that he was a drunk and a womanizer, even though he was in fact a drunk and a womanizer and that drinking and womanizing was unusually and extremely well documented. This investigator, then, was following him in these final weeks to try to prove that
Time
had fairly represented his character. So there was a man with a hat and a spiral notebook and pencil lurking in the corners of the bars those last nights, recording for a possible trial the facts and figures of his self-destructive excess. There was—to that extent, at least—the aura of a crime.

On Halloween, Thomas went to a party. His friend John Berryman later said he was barely able to speak, he was so loaded, but they talked a little bit about Ted Roethke's drinking. Then
a drunk Thomas went, along with two friends, to the White Horse Tavern at nine. While Thomas was there, the private investigator carefully noted down in pencil, “9:00 p.m. enters W.H.T….drank whiskey and a beer chaser.”

Thomas adored the White Horse; it was the closest in New York City he felt to home, with its mahogany bar, its wooden picnic benches, its old-fashioned silhouettes of horses engraved in the windows. Afterward, the three friends moved to another bar on Seventh Avenue. The detective noted: “Describes his impotence. Says how much he loves his wife. Other women and also Caitlin.”

And then, at two-thirty in the morning, the private investigator observed Thomas taking Benzedrine pills. Here one wonders at that last notation, piled on the rest. Why did Thomas, after a night of hard drinking, take the extra Benzedrine so he could stay up longer? Why was he pushing himself? Earlier that day the doctor had told him in quite adamant terms to stay in bed. The doctor told him to eat. Thomas was never big on meals. He liked boiled sweets out of a paper bag, Tootsie Rolls, Milky Ways, Baby Ruths, fizzy children's drinks, but the doctor was suggesting meals. The doctor was suggesting sleep. But he was out again, into the city streets, into the night air, into, inevitably, a bar.

Did he know he was going to die? Did the failure of his marriage feel like dying? Was this the only way the poet could dream up of removing himself from the scene? His daughter, Aeronwy, remembers him threatening to kill himself when
Caitlin said she would leave him. And at an earlier point, when Caitlin wrote him a cruel letter after the affair with Pearl, he wrote to her from Persia, “Your letter, as it was meant to, made me want to die….I cannot live without you—you, always—and I have no intention of doing so.” On that same trip he wrote, “The sun's shining, & I'm in darkness because I do not know if you will ever love me again. And I'll die if you do not. I mean that. I shall not kill myself: I shall die.” This can't, of course, be taken literally; it is precisely the high-blown rhetoric of romantic love that Thomas went in for. But it does express a certain absolutism in his thinking: It lays bare his helpless childlike dependence—Caitlin still cut his nails for him—and his shakiness.

Another anxiety that haunted Thomas during these arduous tours through America was the disconnect between the public poet at the lectern and the private man at home with his notebooks. Thomas was not writing well. He was no longer a poet, he said; he was “a freak user of words.” He had written six poems in six years. He observed ruefully to a reporter from
Time
, “It seems as if my faculties for self-criticism have grown more than my talent.” And consequently he felt that reading poems in lecture halls put him in a painful position. In a letter to a friend, he wrote, “Endless booming of poems didn't sour or stale words for me, but made me more conscious of my obsessive interest in them and my horror that I would never again be innocent enough to touch and use them.” He much preferred reading other people's poems—Yeats, Auden, Roethke, anyone. As he wrote to Princess Caetani, “I do not, now, read any of my poems with much pleasure, because they
tell me I should be writing other poems
now
, because they say I should work on poems every day…I do not like reading my old poems; because I
am
not working on new poems.” Thomas was excellent and creative, however, at wasting time; he wrote once in a letter, “The summer talked itself away.”

But in spite of hours whiled away in the pub, in spite of his nearly insatiable need for company, when Thomas was writing, he was fanatical. He wrote draft after draft; when one looks at the scrawlings and scratchings of those drafts, the sheer labor involved in his poems, the huge amount of time and effort expended on a single word, a phrase, is undeniable. He also felt peace and purpose when he was writing. Those rare moments of concentration in his shed at Laugharne were a great salve to him.

But now he felt that his gift was failing, that he had written his best poems. He wrote to an editor the year before, with great shame, “The nagging, savaging, destroying problem, the real reason the book is as yet unwritten,
that
is what you want explained. And how I can write that reason down?
That
is the thing itself: for a whole year I've been able to write nothing, nothing at all but one tangled, sentimental poem.” To a poet, this might feel like the end of something more important than life.

It is hard to measure the tangible effects of Thomas's impulse toward self-destruction. There were, however, the vicious swipes of self-hatred. One can chart his self-loathing through his last years. At first it is clownish, playful. He writes of himself
to his publisher, “Oh helpless baboon!” But as the years go by, his portraits of himself become more cutting, brutal. He becomes “a little fat man come to make a fool of himself.” Sometimes this critical voice is light, teasing, but increasingly it is sharp. He imagines Pearl Kazin walking away from their affair, thinking, “ ‘No more of that beer cheapened hoddy-noddy, snoring, paunched, his corn, his sick, his fibs, I'm off to Greece where you know where you are; oh, his sodden bounce, his mis-theatrical-demeanor, the boastful tuppence!' ”

Once, he wrote in a letter, “Thank God I don't have to meet myself socially, listen to myself, or except when reluctantly shaving, see that red, blubbery circle, mounted on ballooning body.” Very few people have this store of self-contempt: so physical, so visceral. Does he hate his body itself? Toward the end of his life, there is a tone of precise and furious disappointment, of corrosive sourness, that one recognizes in the late journals of suicides like Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf—an eye that can see in human flesh only vicious decay.

Thomas's most beloved and widely read poem, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” which had been published a year earlier, appears to be a protest against death, an ode to heroic resistance, inspired by his father's death. And yet, if you are in the audience at one of these last readings, your experience of the famous poem is different. When you hear him reciting the familiar line, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” the cadence is so mesmerizing that it seems to be a poem about acceptance; it lulls you into a feeling of goodwill toward the workings of the universe. Its emotional effect is in
fact the opposite of the meaning of the words: It is a paean to the natural order. When one hears the last soft, caressing “Do not go gentle” one can't help but be lost in the loveliness of the lines, seduced. When Thomas stands up onstage, incanting it in his unnaturally beautiful voice, “Though wise men at their end know dark is right,” it is a lullaby, drained of violence, drained of anger. You can suddenly hear in his voice what you cannot see on the page: This is on some very peculiar level a love song to death.