A poet’s last stand – Frank McNally on the death of Dylan Thomas, 70 years ago

The many plaques on the front of New York’s Chelsea Hotel include a suitably poetic tribute to a poet who died 70 years ago: “Dedicated to the memory of Dylan Thomas who lived and laboured last here [...] and from here sailed out to die.”

The more prosaic version of his demise is that, a week beforehand, Thomas woke from an uneasy sleep at 2am, “suddenly reared up with a fierce look in his eyes”, said he needed a drink, and went out to the White Horse Tavern, his regular haunt in the West Village.

Returning to the Chelsea sometime later, he is supposed to have made the notorious (but almost certainly mythical) boast of having downed 18 straight whiskeys, adding: “I think that’s a record.”

This might all have been in keeping in with the philosophy of death outlined in his most quoted verse: “Do not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”

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But he was to go gently enough in the end, after a couple of days of sickness, including a chest infection, followed by a four-day coma.

And although drink had undoubtedly contributed to his early end, aged 39, there were plenty of other factors, including a heavy smoking habit, poor diet, emphysema, pneumonia, the New York smog – at its worst that week – and perhaps even medical negligence.

For the record, the writers of a 2004 biography (one of them a doctor) claimed that all evidence suggests he could not have had more than eight whiskeys in that final binge.

But the legend of the 18 shots may have contributed to the diagnosis of Milton Feltenstein, his personal physician, that the poet was suffering delirium tremens and needed morphine.

This, suggested the biographers, only worsened the breathing difficulties he was having. After the third morphine injection, he lapsed into the coma and never woke up.

Even if 18 whiskeys never happened, Thomas must certainly have set a few drinking records in his short life. One, for duration if not quantity, may even have been in Ireland, during his infamous 1946 visit to Puck Fair.

He was supposed to be covering that event for the US magazine Picture Post, which made the mistake of paying him an advance.

And his letters of the period to friends talk about vast quantities of food consumption in Dublin and Kerry – “we ate ourselves daft: lobsters, steaks, cream, hills of butter, homemade bread, chicken and chocolates” – more than drink.

But a feature of the famous fair in Killorglin then was 24-hour pub licences, which Thomas and his friend Bill MacAlpine also enjoyed to extremes.

According to Thomas’s wife, Caitlin, they drank Guinness at a bar counter for “two days and two nights: 48 consecutive hours!” At the end of which, “they were both still standing, exactly where they had started off.”

As for the second half of the four-day visit, she added: “Bill and Dylan spent the last couple of days and nights of Puck Fair unseen, unmoving and unspeaking in their penitential beds [...] unable to look at themselves, at each other or, least of all, at their crowing womenfolk.”

Caitlin may not always have been a reliable witness, sharing as she did her husband’s chronic alcoholism, a condition that drove her to violence, often, as it drove him to verbosity.

It was a drinking marriage from start to finish. In the opening lines of her posthumously published memoir, Double Drink Story, she wrote:

“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 smugly into the other that they were perfectly complementary. Ours was not only a love story, because without alcohol, it would never have got on to its rocking feet.”

They became quickly inseparable and married the year after. But by the time he died 16 years later, she admitted they were still, in a way, strangers. “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.”

This left her no less angry at his death, however, and at the celebrity that fuelled his self-destruction:

“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.”