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This death was a drama whose details are still being hotly debated. In its sordidness it recalled, among other sad and disorderly exits, the death of Edgar Allan Poe.* But it proves something about Dylan Thomas, and about the typical kibitzers of greatness who flocked to him. The hangers-on are still fighting, figuratively, over his body. Some stick to the story that Thomas died of a cerebral injury caused by a fall at a drinking party. Another group hints that Thomas was fatally dosed with morphine by a doctor whom a rival clique had summoned to treat the poet's alcoholic miseries. Dame Edith Sitwell, rising disdainfully over such partisan bickering, has said that Thomas died of an infection caught when he scratched an eyeball on a rose thorn.
Like Louis Armstrong. The facts are somewhat different. The New York City medical examiner's record shows that he died of acute and chronic alcoholism, complicated by pneumonia. An attending physician called it "alcoholic insult to the brain." When Thomas arrived in the U.S.
for his last visit in October 1953, he planned to go to Hollywood and write an opera with Igor Stravinsky. But first he stopped in New York to make some money by repeating his enormously successful readings of his "play for voices," Under Milk Wood, at Manhattan's Y.M.H.A.
Poetry Center. He was adrift in the baffling city, childishly delighted by its riches but really not caring what happened to him. That week Thomas called an old friend and said: "I'm tired of all the goddam writers around here. Why don't you give me a party with no writers, only beautiful women?" Late that Saturday night, after the party, Thomas showed up at his favorite tavern, the White Horse, a dark-paneled, homey bar on the western outskirts of Greenwich Village. His eyes were glazed, bloodshot, heavy-lidded.
Some pals bought him drinks, and he downed three or four boilermakers in 15 minutes. Later, he went on to another bar, then retired to his hotel room for a warm beer and whisky nightcap with a friend.
Three days and several parties later, New York Times Critic Harvey Breit telephoned him at his hotel. "He seemed bad," Breit recalls. "I wanted to say, 'You sound as though from the tomb.' I didn't.
I heard myself say instead: 'You sound like Louis Armstrong.' " That afternoon a girl assistant from the Poetry Center went to visit Thomas, who was in bad shape.
Towards evening his doctor came and gave him a sedative, and left. The last words his visitor remembers were those of any man who is ill, questions like: "What time is it?" Around midnight Thomas suddenly went into coma. An ambulance rushed him to nearby St. Vincent's Hospital. During the next few days distraught poets, painters, sculptors and assorted hangers-on crowded into the hospital lobby, sometimes 40 deep. Thomas' wife Caitlin flew in from London, proved so distraught herself that she had to be put temporarily into a hospital at Astoria, L.I. That is where she was when Dylan Thomas died, without regaining consciousness.
The Way from Wales. Dylan Thomas had lurched straight for his fate, trusting in the survival of his poetry, which he had once called statements made on the way to the grave.