`I first met Dylan, inevitably, in a pub, since pubs were our natural habitat. From that day onwards, we became dedicated to pubs and to each other. Pubs were our primary dedication; each other our secondary. But one fit so snugly into the other that they were perfectly complementary. Ours was not only a love story, it was a drink story, because without alcohol, it would never have got onto its rocking feet."
These are the opening lines of Caitlin Macnamara Thomas' posthumously published memoir, Double Drink Story. The sepia photograph, right, used on the book's dust-jacket, is a poignant, visual summary of the story contained within the covers. As Caitlin and Dylan look absently into the middle distance, a half-pint glass of stout and a large bottle of porter standing between them, they are together yet not together, both separated from and bound to each other by bottle and glass.
"The only significant difference between our drink story and any of the other drink stories is that in the middle of it was a genius poet." The other difference was that Caitlin survived. Dylan Thomas collapsed and died at the age of 39 in a New York hospital, destroyed by drink. On the night of his death, Caitlin was so drunk and so ferociously angry that she had to be restrained by a straitjacket.
Caitlin Macnamara was born in London in 1913 of an Irish father, Francis, and a mother, Yvonne, who was half Irish and half French. When the marriage broke down, Yvonne moved with the four children to Hampshire: Caitlin was then still a small girl. The children ran wild and free, left to do whatever they liked by the adults around them. It was the type of childhood which was described then as "eccentric" but which we would now have no hesitation in calling "neglected".
The Macnamara children were educated sporadically by a succession of French governesses who were more interested in seducing the only boy of the family, John: Caitlin learned nothing from them except exquisite hand-sewing. She later put this to use by making Dylan cloaks and coats out of blankets and eiderdowns, and shirts out of tablecloths - all of which were stolen from the houses of friends who put them up after binges.
It was Caitlin's ambition to be a dancer in the style of Isadora Duncan. There are photographs of her as a teenager, by the river in Hampshire, arms in stylised positions, looking both fey and a bit ridiculous. In 1931, she went to London with Augustus John's daughter, hoping to make her career as a dancer. She did appear in the chorus line of some shows, but the more significant event of her early years in London was an affair with Augustus John, who was an old family friend.
She and Augustus John had drifted apart by 1936, the year Caitlin met Dylan, then still emerging as a poet, in the Wheatsheaf pub in Fitzrovia, on April 12th. From that day on, her life was fated to be entwined with what remained of his, defined by a co-dependency on alcohol and each other. They married the following year. Decades later, she wondered: "But what were we really like underneath the alcohol? The truth is that I have not got a glimmering of a clue. And I still cannot get at it - not the whole truth, only little bits, stray fragments that emerge from out of an impenetrable barrier of alcohol . . . I never really knew Dylan." When he died, they had been married for 16 years.
Double Drink Story is a disturbing book to read, one written with the uncomfortable honesty of an alcoholic who no longer drinks. It will be read more widely than just by those interested in poetry and literature and seeking to glean new insights into Dylan Thomas: it will also be read by those struggling to understand the impact of alcoholism on a marriage. It is a powerful elegy to destruction and waste: not just of squandered talent, but of wasted love and a resulting shambolic family life.
The Thomas marriage revolved around whatever bar they were nearest and in which Dylan - who was by then building up a reputation for his work - always managed to charm people into buying them both drink, day and night. When drunk, he became ever more effusive. When Caitlin was drunk, she became aggressive, and hit people. Sometimes she trashed the room. As a result she was often ignored, which only incited her further. Also, this was a period when women were usually absent from bars and pubs, so her presence was tacitly resented in any case.
Even after the birth of the first of her three children with Dylan, her son Llewelyn in 1939, neither of them changed their drinking routines. He, because of the feckless irresponsibility which caused Caitlin to dub him "a Professional Baby. He would never grow up. He had made up his mind not to." She, though she did not want to drink after giving birth, still joined her husband in the pub every evening "so unalterable was the habit of obedience to the drinking virus".
Only when money and favours ran out completely did Dylan sit down and write. Caitlin affirms that he never combined drinking and writing, but always sat down to write totally sober. She took little interest in his work, and absented herself from most of his public readings. This was partly because she did not understand his "senseless, jumbled, mumbled, confusing, strung-together words . . . it did not go in one ear and out the other; it never even got in my first ear": and partly, it was because she saw his gift for poetry as an interloper between them and the cause of other women constantly seducing her husband for the sake of "sleeping with a genius".
After Dylan's death, Caitlin moved to Italy with her three children. In 1957, she met Giuseppe Fazio, an assistant film director 11 years younger than her. He stayed with her, despite endless rows about her drinking, and aged 49, she gave birth to their son, Francesco. His birth, combined with Giuseppe's support, was the catalyst for her long and traumatic journey towards giving up drink.
As part of her therapy, after joining Alcoholics Anonymous, she began writing down the story of her drinking life, and her life with Dylan. When she was still a belligerent alcoholic, she had written a previous bitter memoir, Left- over Life to Kill. Her second memoir, written at this time in Italy, was this one, Double Drink Story. It was found among her papers after her death in 1994.
For the last 20 years of her life, she had stayed off drink. Francesco says frankly in his after-word to the book: "For me, reading about my mother's life with Dylan is like a nightmare."
There are certainly many gut-wrenching descriptions in the book of binges and resulting illness and domestic havoc, such as Dylan's 48-hour session standing at a bar in Killorglin during Puck Fair, drinking every penny of their holiday money. For alcoholics, like any addicts, the world Caitlin and Dylan inhabited was observed from a different perspective. Material goods were there only to be sold or pawned. The responsibility of children was offloaded onto others. Talent was wasted. Love was betrayed. Friends existed only to be stolen from, sponged off or exploited. No wonder Francesco Fazio found it such painful reading.
BUT what also emerges from this book is how puzzled Caitlin was by the love between herself and Dylan. Whether it was the ever-present alcohol in their marriage which addled her feelings at the time, or retrospective doubt in the intervening years, the impression Double Drink Story gives is that she never knew whether she adored Dylan or abhorred him.
Certainly, decades later, she was still angry at being abandoned by his early, self-inflicted death: "He made himself so important that, like the frog in the fable, he blew himself up till he burst. As pathetic and awful as that. And he left one of us to stew in the wicked juices of his perfectly unnecessary sacrifice - in the name of that confounded poetry."
Double Drink Story by Caitlin Thomas, is published by Virago, price £12.99 in UK