The Violet Hour (26 page)

Wild rumors began to spread. The poet had fallen down a flight of stairs. He had been attacked on the street. He had
pricked his eye on a rose.
The New York Times
ran a laconic notice: “Dylan Thomas, Welsh poet, was in St. Vincent's Hospital yesterday with a serious brain ailment. Mr. Thomas, who is 39 years old, collapsed late Wednesday night in his quarters at the Hotel Chelsea.”

For those who would like to contest the events of Thomas's last conscious night, the eighteen straight whiskeys have taken on a luminous importance. There are hefty biographies that devote pages and pages to the question of whether he drank eight drinks on that last night or eighteen as he boasted. Several of his friends went to the White Horse Tavern to grill the bartenders on how many whiskeys they had served him. They examined the bottle of Old Grand-Dad on his dresser at the hotel to see how many glasses had been consumed. All of this sleuthing springs from an effort to establish Thomas's innocence somehow, to make him a spectator or a victim in the night's murderous events. One of his biographers reasoned, “Why would he go out at all when there was whiskey in his room?” It is as if the answer to the question of whether he had eight whiskeys or eighteen could somehow undo the fact that Thomas had died or could transform him into a moderate, sensible man who did not abuse his body or entertain any ambivalence about continuing on. Even Liz Reitell, who knew he was an alcoholic, made the implausible claim: “He was either sober or semi-sober most of the time that I was with him.”

It seems clear, however, that whatever the exact blood alcohol content of Dylan Thomas's last few days, the coma was part of a script that was already being written, as surely as the script
for
Under Milk Wood
. It may have been an accident, but it was an accident that was so thoroughly imagined, so thoroughly thought through ahead of time and incorporated into a worldview, so intrinsic to who he was or had become, that one can't view it as totally separate and discrete from the man's life.

If Thomas did not literally have eighteen whiskeys, there was in the claim, in the swagger and excess of it, something true to the magnitude of his thirst. If he was not giving an accurate account of his bar tab, he
was
giving an accurate and realistic account of his need to escape, of the distance he needed to travel to get away, of the urgency of that flight and transport. Take an average evening at any point in Thomas's life: One sees the effort to go on for one more hour, one more drink, one more Benzedrine, one more story, one more joke. Thomas was the kind of man who wanted to stay out because to be at home in bed was to surrender to nothingness. This is one of the reasons for the insomnia from which Thomas suffered: the desire to prolong, to keep going, to stave off a frightening quiet, which is being alone with oneself. Thomas found drinking the best cure for insomnia.

Is this itself the protest? Is this the “rage, rage against the dying of the light”? Five drinks, six drinks, seven, the desperate desire to carry on—is this the force that took Thomas out of his room in the Chelsea Hotel at two-thirty in the morning to go to the bar? Was every night for Thomas a little bit the last night on earth?

His last few weeks were filled with a self-torment that was ratcheted up higher than it had been before. And yet, in all this
hurtling toward the White Horse Tavern in a taxi, it is interesting that he was still grasping at happiness—that he was going to have sex with a new woman in these days, that he would seek out more conversation, that he was not finished with pleasure. His words hang over these last days: Celebrate animal creation, though remotely. The interesting thing in these last painful, mad days is how much love there is of life.

In 1945, a younger, unharmed Thomas wrote the beautiful lines, “Time held me green and dying / Though I sang in my chains like the sea.” This is from the poem “Fern Hill.” For Thomas, one could be young and dying, green and vibrant and still dying. There was no contradiction here: Everyone was dying, everything was dying, and the world was more gorgeous and miraculous because of it. One of his old drinking buddies from Swansea remembers Thomas turning to him in his twenties and saying, “I've got death in me.”

In many ways, Thomas's approach to longevity or the long haul reveals itself in his approach to money. Take the thousands of dollars he earned from his American tours. He was paid handsomely for readings, for his famous booming voice, for his appearance in a shabby tweed jacket, for his colorful and outrageous behavior at the faculty parties afterward. In fact, the entire point of the American tours was to make enough money to enable him to write quietly in the shed in Laugharne, but the lecture fees vanished like a child's sand castle by the ocean. After Thomas's first tour, John Brinnin hid eight hundred
dollars for Caitlin in a purse packed in Thomas's suitcase, because he knew that if Thomas found it he would spend every single penny on the ship before he got home. How did he go through all this money so quickly? At one point, Brinnin noted, Thomas was spending one hundred dollars in a day, not including his hotel. This was fairly impressive in an era when a cocktail at a New York bar cost sixty cents. Traveling across the country, Thomas would sometimes run out of money and Brinnin would have to wire him funds, because all of a sudden Thomas couldn't afford cigarettes or cab fare. Why couldn't he think to wire for money before he literally ran out? Why, at around this same time, couldn't he save a tiny portion of one of his lecture fees for his son's tuition, before the boy was thrown out of school? His attitude was the same at home. He wouldn't pay taxes until the government tracked him down and demanded them. He wrote checks for money he didn't have in his bank account, even after notices that the account was overdrawn. He was in fact earning quite a significant amount of money by that point, but he couldn't hold on to it. One can't help thinking his radical irresponsibility about money says something about his apprehension of time: Life is not scrolling forward for Thomas in the usual way. The day, the hour, the pub he is in, are in some very real sense the end of the world.

There again is the pause on his walk to the West Village with Liz Reitell, when he stopped to look at the poster for
Houdini
. There are the chains, the locked wooden boxes at the bottom of the sea, the miraculous, improbable stunt of escape. Maybe he will write a story about Houdini. Maybe he will write a story. And yet they move on, subsumed into the crowd on the
cobblestone streets. Thomas wrote one of his very last letters, a sort of delirious fantasy about himself as Houdini at the bottom of the sea, to Princess Caetani: “Oh, one time the last time will come and I'll never struggle, I'll stay down here forever handcuffed and blindfolded, sliding my woundaround music, my sack trailed in the slime, withal the rest of the self-destroyed escapologists in their cages, drowned in the sorrows they drown and in my piercing own, alone and one with the coarse and cosy damned seahorsey dead, weeping my tons.” Is this what Thomas was? A self-destroyed escapologist. There seems no better description. Weeping his tons.

Thomas was not someone who lived easily and naturally with the idea of consequences. Often when he was staying with rich people, he would steal something from them. He would open their closets and put several of their fine cotton shirts in his suitcase, for instance. He would be caught, and he knew he would be caught, but this being caught was so abstract to him—as it took place in the hazy and nebulous future, when you would be called into account for all the things you were called into account for—that it didn't mean anything. As a result, the great poet had a large number of other people's beautiful shirts.

How does one sing in one's chains like the sea? One starts with a lot of drinks. Then a new woman, or two new women, or two new women in the space of a single evening. On one of his last desperate days, Thomas went upstairs at a party in a townhouse on Sutton Place and had sex with the countess who was hosting the party, while his mistress Liz Reitell drank gin and tonics downstairs. This has a quality of fever, of someone determined
to squeeze not one life but several out of an evening. This may be how one sings in one's chains like the sea.

His friend Robert Lowell put it this way: “He gave a great feeling of health and unhealth, of someone who was ruining himself. The joy seemed very real and the darkness seemed very real and neither of them seemed to exist without the other.”

In some sense what makes people love Thomas is this almost grotesque vitality, the irrepressible, irresistible, sensual celebration he could not help but write. It pulses through his most beloved lines: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” There is an almost cartoonish life, an overbrimming energy in his poems that even people who do not in general respond to poetry can appreciate. Why
should
he praise God and the beauty of earth as he moved to horrible death? The protest, the great loud mournful animal cry, the violence, are all there, rolled up with the praise. The beautiful and the life-giving can't be separated from death. “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees / Is my destroyer.” It is this paradox, this morbidity mingled with celebration, the great seductive virile power of nature, combined with a constant awareness of its killing that is the essence of Thomas. There is something of this same too muchness in his days. It makes one think of a line he wrote once to a girl he was flirting with: “Perhaps my nature itself is overwritten.”

And indeed Thomas's behavior in New York in those last weeks seemed to be setting up the contradiction: How could
someone with that much life in him die? The sick man who felt compelled to get out of bed at two-thirty in the morning and go to the bar for more beer, for more conversation, more jokes, how does that man die? Thomas worked through this paradox in his unfinished elegy to his father: “Too proud to die, broken and blind he died.” The heartbreak of it, the protest, is putting it all in one line separated by only the comma. In this way he telegraphs the tragic reversal, the intrusion of reality. It doesn't matter how proud he is. He dies anyway. And right beneath it the rhythm of protest: He can't die! He's too proud to die!

As she sat next to his hospital bed, did Liz Reitell think of that poster of Houdini, of the death-defying magician? Now he lay there, his eyes opening every now and then. Did he know she was there? Liz sat there for days, doing the work of watching him die. She may have wondered if she was the right person to be sitting there. There was a telegram from his wife lying on the table next to his bed, and Liz knew she was on her way to New York. Liz had tried to leave him in those last days leading up to the coma—one night she told him to drop her off at her apartment in a cab—but she had failed.